Five for Friday

It's time for the weekly Five for Friday linky! Hooray!

1. In the midst of all the other things we have been doing, I somehow found some random time throughout the day for the kids to work on their coffee filter earths. Not everyone is done yet. But it will be done next week! Blog post about it to come once they are all done! Promise!

2. We're learning about data and graphs in Math so, of course, we need some fun activities like sorting and graphing bunny marshmallows!

3. One of our teachers went to Bali over the summer under a grant. While he was there, he studied the music culture and education there. Part of the grant, I think, is to bring the things you've learned back with you into the classroom. He ended up joining a gamelan group in SF and arranged for them to come to our school for an assembly. It was pretty awesome! The group introduced the different gamelan instruments, dances, and costumes to the students.

4. Our current ELA unit is on games. We read the poem "Mary Mack" this week. Played the game four different ways with partners. My teacher's edition wanted me to focus on visualizing with the students so I came up with the idea right in the middle of the lesson to create Mary Mack comics. They turned out pretty well for a very last minute lesson idea!

5. Our phonics lesson on Friday. First, I was just following my teacher's edition's instructions to write the word "goat" on the board and ask students to move along the spelling chain but either changing a vowel sound/spelling or beginning or ending sound/spelling. Then, as our chain started to get longer and longer (I actually had to erase and the move the words to the very left of the board to give more space), I decided to challenge the kids and see if we could somehow end up back at "goat". It took some work and I had to make the exception of my rule of no repeating words, but 30 minutes later, we did it! One of my parent volunteers walked into the room to grab her reading group and she was pretty amazed at what the kids had accomplished. The kids were SO proud of themselves. They actually asked me to take a picture of the board and email it to their parents! Now, that's a first! :)

This weekend is going to be spent hanging out with some students. I donated two sessions of a lunch and movie date with two lucky students to our school auction. Oddly enough, the winners chose the same weekend to get this done. So on Saturday, I will be having lunch and watching Oz, the Great and Powerful with two students. On Sunday, I will be having lunch and watching The Croods. It will be fun. I'm actually looking forward to it!

Okay, I guess that's actually six things. Oops. Don't forget to link up! :)