Jog the Web

So I found a wicked website that allowed me to keep a running track of middle grade authors. Here are 11 authors sites. Some may be new but most of them you should recognize...It's called Jog the Web and you can "jog" along with me by clicking here: X

Hear Ye Hear Ye

Don't forget that Reading Logs for September are due Wednesday!

You also need a white t-shirt on Friday for Tye-dying! How messy and exciting! Twist, twist, wrap with rubber band- snap!

Busy Week!

Not only do we start Stanford Testing this week. We also have these celebrations going on:

Tuesday Night: Curriculum Night
Wednesday: Drama Club Tryouts and Math Curriculum Night in the Round Room
Friday: Scholastic Book Orders are due!

Phew....I'm looking forward to seeing all the parents again or for the first time!

Our Read ALOUD

The Wednesday Wars

On Wednesday afternoons, Holling Hoodhood is alone in the classroom with his teacher, Mrs. Baker, who Holling is convinced hates his guts. He feels more certain after Mrs. Baker assigns Shakespeare's plays for Holling to discuss during their shared afternoons. Each month in Holling's tumultuous seventh-grade year is a chapter in this novel set in suburban Long Island during the late '60s.

Mrs. Baker is too good to be true: she arranges a meeting between Holling and the New York Yankees, brokers a deal to save a student's father's architectural firm, and, after revealing her past as an Olympic runner, coaches Holling to the varsity cross-country team.

However, Schmidt, makes the implausible believable and the everyday momentous. We are finding the story's themes: the cultural uproar of the '60s, the internal uproar of early adolescence, and the timeless wisdom of Shakespeare's words very interesting. Holling's unwavering, distinctive voice offers a gentle, hopeful, moving story of a boy who, with the right help, learns to stretch beyond the limitations of his family, his violent times, and his fear, as he leaps into his future with his eyes and his heart wide open.

Schools then Vs. NOW
SO far we have found that in Y2K there aren't many chalk-filled erasers here to clap at Baldwin.

Just like Holling's school, we too have little rodents running around freely!

They have textbooks for each subject while we only have 1.

That Shakespeare is a wordsmith!

Hurricanes, living things, Podcasts- Oh My!

Classification

So we rounded up the week classifying the alphabet! How do you classify letters you ask? Easy. First we grouped them A-J (the first 10 letters) then we broke them down into smaller and smaller groups. Students came up with grouping them by shape, strokes, sounds they make, vowels, even students names. So creative! We related this activity to how scientists classify animals. Scientific Classification is a grouping in itself. Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus and Species. Or as we like to say: Kings Play Chess On Fine Grained Sand.

Can you name the 5 kingdoms?


Our Living Things Research Project

Students created a web of the 6 functions of living things. Then in groups of 2 they analyzed different animals from Sandra Markle's Animal Scavengers Series. Here are a few of the finished posters. This is one bunch that is crazy about living things!

Hurricanes

We are reviewing map skills by locating the current hurricanes. Students are also locating places on a map using longitude and latitude coordinates. Check out Ike and Josephine here!

Podcasts- Oh My!

As word nerds and future word nerds unite we are sharing books that we love by giving book talks. We listened to our first Podcast: Chatting about Books from Read Write Think. Emily Manning introduced us to some This week we checked out the Spatulatta Cookbook and Fairy Tale Feasts- two great additions to our library.