Five for Friday

Friends...I'm EXHAUSTED! Aren't short weeks supposed to be a breeze??

Guess not when there's a whole bunch of learning happening every day! Which means it's time for...

Omg...I can't tell you what a great feeling it was to know that I had extra day to sleep in! Especially since my body apparently needs a day to realize that sleeping in is okay so I typically only get to sleep in on Sundays. My body naturally wakes up around alarm time on Saturdays. Makes me so sad...

Anyways, Monday was spent having lunch with my colleagues from my first school back in Oakland. Also meant I got to go back and visit college stomping grounds. We've been getting some intense heat this week in California so that only meant I had to go get me some froyo!

Orange creamiscle, yum yum!

Speaking of my school in Oakland...look what I found in my current teaching neighbor's room. 

See that name..."Thornhill"?? That's the name of my school in Oakland!!! Of course, I had to ask my colleague where the box came from. Turns out she got the box from a coworker in her previous district whose husband worked as a music teacher in Oakland. I didn't recognize the name but still...such a small world! Also a sign that this school was meant to be.

So after hearing all these bloggers rave about Stitch Fix, I finally decided to give it a try. I am SO not a fashionista, let alone clothes shopping. I basically buy all my clothes at Old Navy so I was very interested to see what I would end up with. 

Here is the style card that I got with my package.

After trying everything on, I ended up keeping two of the clothing articles, the cropped pants and the cardigan.

Fun experience overall, but way out of my budget to continue on a monthly basis. But I am definitely up to get another fix maybe like six months later! Haha.

Okay, I suppose I should talk some school now. We had our first "Art in Action" session this week. This whole program is new to me, but it looks like a great program, especially because the parents do the teaching! 

Our first lesson was on Van Gogh's "Starry Night". The students look at the brush strokes, talked about depth and perspective, and then recreated their own version of the masterpiece.

 Pretty cool! Looking forward to all other future art sessions!

Math this week has been all about mental math strategies. Practicing mental math means I get to do my favorite math activity...number talks!

I absolutely LOVE number talks because I love to see the different ways students visual the problem. I learn so much from them this way! I told my students that I was not taught to think out of the box when I was learning math in elementary school. That just wasn't the focus then. They are so lucky that the focus has changed now and that they are given more freedom to look at numbers in different ways without being told to stick to one specific method. It's not about the answer, my friends. What's important is the journey to the answer!

After looking over homework writing from the last two weeks, I quickly realized that we need a refresher on paragraph writing. Never was quite sure how to approach it but thank goodness I stumbled upon Mrs. Prince and Co's entry on stoplight paragraphs!

First we talked about the different features of a paragraph and relating each part to a light on the stoplight.

We recently compared two different articles on creating acorn food products in our Ohlone unit. It only made sense in my head for us to write a class paragraph about it. What a difficult task to complete but the students all felt SO accomplished when we were done!

Since I teacher ELA to two classes, I decided that one class would come up with a comparing paragraph while the other class came up with a contrasting paragraph!

After creating our paragraphs I rewrote the sentences on color coordinated sentence strips (didn't have red so substituted with pink). Then we pieced all the sentence strips together, making sure all the words fit on our "paper".

Next week, the kids are going to write their own paragraphs using the colored strips. Can't wait to see their stoplight paragraph puzzles! 

So way more happened in the classroom than what was mentioned, but I forgot to take pictures! I have even remembered to bring my camera to school, but never actually take it out! I need to remind myself to start taking more pics so I also make myself blog more often!

But for now, I will end with a picture of my new staff id. Officially a staff member of College Park Elementary! But, oh, my hair! @@