We’ve had a lot of indoor recess in January. After an unusually warm November and December, January has really thrown us for a loop.
It took no time to get back into our independent reading routines, even after such a long break.
We have two different types of jobs in our classroom. One set change every day. Those include our line leader and meeting manager and physical trainer. Everybody gets to do those jobs about once a month. The other jobs are ones students have for weeks. They apply for those jobs so they decide what they’re interested in and would be good at. These jobs include things like attendance monitor (that person tells me who is absent), scheduler (who sets up our daily schedule on the board), plant waterer, librarians (take care of our classroom library), and more.
Arrays can be a very useful tool as we get to more and more challenging multiplication and division problems. We started small and, throughout the week, stretched ourselves more and more.
As we got back to studying multiplication and division, we started off with a Task and Share. Students tried out one multiplication problem and then a few of them shared how they had solved it. Everyone got to see several different strategies and deepen their understanding of how multiplication works. They did an awesome job!
Throughout December we worked on writing our own fairy tales. These might be closely based on fairy tales we know or they might just use a fairy tale character or plot point and go in a completely new direction. As we finished them up, some students shared dialogue, action, or setting from their stories.
With days of indoor recess happening, GoNoodle has been an even more important part of our routine.
Our study of ancient Egypt got sidetracked a bit with December chaos. So now we’re digging in to ancient China. Hopefully we’ll be able to really get some research done around questions that interest us.
We’re back to studying multiplication and division. Today we looked at some arrays that you might find in your daily life (like a carton of eggs). These students, on the first day back after three weeks away, knew exactly what to do!
I guess after a week of snow days it isn’t surprising that we will have a bit more indoor recess time.
