Muslim Woman in Amman

It is Friday and as such time  for Doodle Bugs Teaching Five for Friday link up party. It was a short week so not much happened but it was still a great week. In Math we were learning about surveys and pie charts so we made one of our own. Even though there are eighteen students and we only surveyed twelve of them I tried to make it a whole class project. First the five teams had to come up with one question each. Then the whole class voted on the question. We ended up with the question: What is your favorite movie? Next we voted on the options then finally on the colors. Then I had the kids pull numbers out of a hat and those who got 1 to 12 got to answer the survey. The rest got to shade in the pie chart. After we were done they signed the chart and we put it outside for all to see. The kids loved it. We are working on perfect tenses in ELA this unit so I came up with a few ways to show future, present and past perfect. For future we have not done it yet, We will have

Recently I have been working on creating my own clip art. I still need a lot of practice but I think I have some good pieces. Below are some of my most recent ones. What do you guys think?

     It has been a crazy day for me today. I had two meetings scheduled during class time so I had to find someone to cover both times. Luckily it is a PE day so I just rearranged the schedule to have PE during one of my meetings. The other one was Writers Workshop so the kids just worked on that. On top of all that it was a rainy day in the Bay Area so INDOOR RECESS!! So lucky(not). So I think I had about ten minutes of free time today.      On the plus side my Fake Fireplace that I talked about here , was the envy of all. I had another class come in and ask if they could borrow it for their reading time. I am really happy with the results of my fireplace I just hope it does not fall apart before the school year ends.

     ITS FRIDAY!!!!! Time for this weeks Five for Friday linky party over at  Doodle Bugs Teaching Blog . This week has been pretty good, We had a lot of fun. We made a fake fireplace to sit around as we read Three Cups of Tea and what ever we read after. I divided the process into two sections the inside and the outside. Half the class made the bricks and the other half made the fire. After we finished we had a little reading/tea party in front of the fire. I used LED tealight candles to light the fire and we put our tea pot in front. Then we all sat down and drank some "tea" also known as apple juice.  Every Wednesday we have Art Orbit. The school divides the entire school into groups named after planets. The groups have students ranging in age from kinder to 8th grade. Each teacher comes up with and art, craft, or cooking project and has to teach it to all the groups, one group every Wednesday till you finish the rotation. This week was our last rotati

     I just had to share what I heard today. One of the parents I met with during the conferences told the principal that she was so happy with our conference and that I really understood her child. After all the worry I felt over the conferences its nice to have someone say that I was great. Something like that makes me do a happy dance! Happy Dance

In class we are reading Three Cups of Tea  by Greg Mortenson. We are working on connecting our reading to the world around us i.e. Text and World. I made a little chart for my kids to write the connections they found. And because we are reading Three Cups of Tea we drank some "tea" before we started. It was really apple juice but I served it from a ceramic tea pot. The kids loved it and wanted more but I had to limit them to the one cup. I am thinking of starting every reading session with a cup of "tea" just like in the book.

     Last week my kids did the Mystery Bag Challenge I found here  Create an Engineering Mystery Bag Challenge for Kids  . We did the Pom-Pom Launcher one and it went great. The kids had a lot of fun with the challenge. We had different types of launchers but they all ended up being some type of slingshot device, think Angry Birds. The winners, Team Gravitational, got theirs to go 30 feet. As a reward for going twice the distance of the next best one, they each got a teacher coupon. Thanks to that win this week deprived me of my chair and my desk, on both Thursday and Friday. The Winning Team

I have been reading the Five for Friday posts for a few months now and decided to try my hand at linking up my new blog this week. So with out further ado my Five for Friday. My sister-in-law has been volunteering for the  PCRF  and had some cards they wanted to send to children in Gaza. She asked me if my kids could write some and they did. They did an excellent job and their cards were really sweet. Getting ready for Parent Teacher Conferences this week I decided to relieve some stress by turning my very boring student binder into something a little nicer. Our current unit is about energy, so I put together a little activity for my kids to do. I created some images of different sources of energy, and they had to color them and cut it out and divide them into renewable and non-renewable sources. Shadow, our new hamster. He is awfully cute. My crazy kids. The boys tried to fit as many boys as they can on one chair. My girls were a