On another note..congratulations to our Pawsitive Panthers nominees Chloe and Charlie!  We were so excited to hear our names on the announcements this morning.  Chloe also won Pawsitve Panther for third grade.  We are so excited to have such great manners in our classroom.  I am looking for two more nominees for this six weeks!

Today in class, we finished reading Utterly Me, Clarice Bean.  Who are the main characters in the book?  What are the traits of these characters?  Do these characters change throughout the book?  I look forward to hearing about the characters in Utterly Me, Clarice Bean! 

Miss Linsenbardt

I am going to continue using this blog for the time-being.  We are working on getting student blogs set up in ePals.  I have all the students set up with logins for ePals however I’m not sure exactly how to get you set up so you can start viewing and responding to your students on their blog.  I love how secure ePals is and am feeling much better about it being safer for the students since people cannot view the blog without loggign into ePals.  As soon as I can get parent users set up, I will switch our blog over there.  I miss blogging so I’ll continue on here.  For the safety of the kids, I will not mention names or post pictures of students on this blog.  Please don’t allow your child to use this blog as I’ll be going through and deleting theirs.  I will get them started on their ePals blogs soon so that they are blogging in a safe environment!  Thanks again for all of your patience with switching our sites over to password-protected sites for our kids’ safety!

Miss Linsenbardt

Here are the rules we came up with for buzzing effectively:

1. All members of your group can see ach other

2. Talk in your group quietly

3. One person should talk at a time

4. Good listeners look at the person who is speaking

5. Group members do not interrupt each other

6. Members need to listen to the person speaking to understand what they are saying

7. When the speaker is finished talking, each member shares their thoughts or questions.

8. The next member takes a turn.

Students are now buzzing about what they are reading.  You can try buzzing at  home too!

Once we get up and running we will be skyping with Emma on a regular basis.  She will share with us what she is learning about the different places she is visiting around the world.  We will keep you up to date with pictures and what we are learning through this class blog.  We will also be following her travels on Google Earth marking her stops along the way to learn more about the different countries around our planet.  We can’t wait to Skype with Emma again!

On the first day of school, students had a chance  to get to know each other.  First, students got to know their teammates.  Our classroom is divided into four groups.  Each group has five or six students in it.  Each team made a team name poster.  Our teams this six weeks are Short Horns, Blue Thunderbolts, L-Force, and Warriors Born to be Wild.  Each team member has a job for the week and they rotate through their team jobs each week for the six weeks.  In five weeks, we will switch teams and make up a new team name for our new groups.  I really like how this adds teamwork to our classroom! 

During the first week we also made necklaces to tell about ourselves.  The different colored beads represented different characteristics of each student where it be how many brothers and sisters they have or what hobbies they have.  We learned about math in our world and school and made our very first vodcast.

Thanks again for checking out the blog!  I will start making entries on a daily basis from now on   Have a great day!