Happy Veterans Day and Many More!

It has been awhile since my last post...but it has been a busy time. A load has been lifted with our school's levy passed, so that means job is safe for the next 5 years unless our state does something weird.

That aside...we have been busy in room 204! Especially this Veterans Day. I feel like these holidays are important to focus on with my students so they can learn to respect and honor these days early on. My students had already read the book The Wall by Eve Bunting and had several connections by having family members being soldiers...so I knew this would be a very important activity for them.

As I was planning I knew my main goal was to teach my students how Veterans Day came to be, and then have them create something that would honor the day as well. We had done something for 9/11, so I wanted it to be a little bigger than just our class creating a memorial quilt. Taking the idea of a memorial wall, I thought it would be great to get the whole school involved. So, I just emailed everyone telling them the idea of building a wall where each student creates a brick. On it they would reflect on what freedom and peace mean to them and then a quick thank you to Veterans. I was amazed by the response...here is the end result:

It was great having the school come together for this :) What was great is that the students REALLY did connect...one of my students dedicated his brick to his family members that served:

Speaking of holidays we also had students prepare for the Thanksgiving season and write down what they are thankful for...surprisingly this was harder than the Veterans Day activity:

It certainly has perked up the hallway :)

In between it all we have started our opinion writing unit, and as part of their generating ideas, we had students listen to an NPR "This I Believe" broadcast, where a kindergartner wrote down 100 things he believes in. This sparked our students to then write a list of their own. They then picked one and started to write three reasons why they believe that statement they made. Here are some examples mid process:

Sorry for the sideways glance...can't get it to rotate!

Before this we looked at different opinion pieces and discovered they had things in common. So, we made a chart "toolbox" to refer to as we write our opinion pieces.

 To end my post...should be a piece of cake :) We had fun with idioms! Students watched the cartoon "Symphony of Slang" as well as saw different examples of idioms to understand what an idiom is. We then gave them their own idiom, to practice using it in a sentence and what that would look like if it was taken literally..they loved it!

Caught up for now...next week I hope to share some of the great things we are doing with Main Idea and Details!