January 26th

First of all, it is with a heavy heart that  I would like to say good-bye to Jacob and Saray from our class. We will miss them both and we wish them the best. We read a book called Flying Solo earlier in the year where a class had "rock rituals" to say good bye to friends that left and we wanted to do the same. So today we had our first rock ritual for Jacob and we will have one Monday for Saray. Ask the kids to explain the rock ritual to you!

We also have a new student joining our class! Her name is Alexis. The kids are doing a wonderful job making her feel welcome.

Reminder** Send in one yellow and one red pocket folder with brads tomorrow.

Thank you for trusting me!! Our class has officially revolted today and the war is over. Just to fill you in, all of the kids were handed 10 starbursts on Monday but we also told them Mr. Lawry was not sure about giving candy to the kids with the nutrition laws so he wanted to speak with us. We had a "hall meeting" with all of the fourth graders where he told us that he had some rules to go with the starbursts:
You owe 1 starburst for using the bathroom
You owe 2 starbursts if you do not bring homework
You owe 1 starburst for tallking in the hall
They went from being happy about getting the starburts, to not so sure with all of the rules attached to them. Each day the rules got more "intolerable", Mr. Lawry added rules like giving starbursts for driking water, sharpening pencils, getting out of your desk, eating snack and eating lunch!! Lunch was the straw!  :)  The kids began writing petitions, making signs, having secret meetings with friends from other classes and the neat part is they used all of these terms and initiated these things on their own! It all came to a head today right before lunch when many of the fourth grade students stormed the halls, heading towards Mr. Lawry's office to rebel. The kids did an awesome job relating everything to the events that lead up to the Revolutionary War. 21/22 kids in our class did not like the rules and called themselves patriots, we had one loyalist who stuck to his guns. Two of the other classes were mostly loyalists, wanting to do exactly what Mr. Lawry wanted. We had one student say, "these rules are intolerable!" I think our class came as close as possible today to feeling just like the colonists did!

January 19th

Our classroom happenings: Reading-We just finished exploring changes in character with our class shared book Because of Winn Dixie and the kids are now in Mystery Detective Clubs! They will  explore mysteries as they meet in Detective Book clubs and discuss clues and suspects with the other members of their group.  We will also make predictions during reading and confirm and adjust predictions as a skill to sharpen our comprehension.  We are learning what a red herring is and will be on the lookout for them as we read our mystery books.   Writing-We joined Ms. Crowley's class in a snowman exchange by drawing a creative picture of a snowman, writing a detailed description of our snowman, and then giving just our writing piece to a buddy in Ms. Crowley's class to see how close he/she could come to our drawing. Her class did the same thing with us and our finished pieces and drawings are hanging in the halls.  Math-We have begun a unit on fractions while continuing to practice computation and our multiplication facts.  Content-This week we will finish our unit on land forms, share our glogs and we'll begin studying the American Revolution next week.  Technology-We are now glog experts! We made glogs on the causes of the American Revolution and our land form glogs will be posted soon!!  :)    *Check our calendar for other important dates.