Muslim Woman in Amman

My fourth grade students are going over their multiplication tables in math this week. I thought to bring a little more fun with it so I created some flash cards to help them visualize the idea. First I created the number sentences like the one below. I personalized the numbers so each number has a different look. All numbers from ten on are holding hands to show that they are a group. I also created flashcards with flowers or pencils on them to use as a more visual representation of the number sentence. If the number sentence is 12*8 they would need to put down 12 groups of 8 flowers.  I have a few other plans to do with these cards, I will post here when I try them to let you know how they turn out.

It's Friday! I love my kids but I love the weekends more, especially when Monday is a staff day and I am kid free for three whole days. Anyway here is a look back on my week.  We started out cooperative strip paragraph this week the unedited version looks good. We started the editing process today. Unfortunately we were not able to finish editing today but hopefully we will finish it on Tuesday. I'll post the completed version next week. I was talking to one of my parents on Thursday and he told me the greatest thing I have heard all year. "My son is really engaged this year. He comes home everyday and tells me what he learned that day. Thank you." Things like that make my week. Starting a new unit soon so I have been working on setting it up this week. We will be learning about energy and matter and how they interact. I created a carbon 13 molecule clipart that I am going to put on my class door and then put my kids faces in place of the neutrons, p...

     Columbus Day was this week and since our unit is about exploration we had a few Columbus activities. One activity was to put Columbus back together from all his broken pieces.  I found the template here The kids had fun coloring him and putting him together. I had one student who decided she would rather have Christa Columbus and gave him long hair and a skirt. Unfortunately she did that after I took the pictures below so I do not have the pic.      We also did a team project in which the teams had to create a picture of the Nina, Pinta, or Santa Maria using craft supplies. The sails are made from felt, the ships from popsicle sticks, clouds from cotton, and sea and sky from colored paper, finally a little glitter to jazz it up.

This year I am using Words Their Way to teach spelling to my students. Every Monday we go over the spelling sort of the week. I write out the words on sentence strips and cut them out. Then we sit in a circle on the carpet and we read the words. Once we a re done reading my students have to find the pattern. The last three sorts were about adding -ing so the kids picked up on it quickly this week. We keep going back to the spelling pattern all week. I have the kids look for them in their homework, on the charts in the classroom, and we also did adding -ing to our Sentence Patterning Chart (SPC). We even have a special colored highlighter that represents our spelling on the charts, purple.  At the end of the week the students need to paste the words in their notebook so it is like a mini dictionary for them. This week I had them do a fold-able with the original words on the front and they open it to see the -ing form.