Author Visit

Mr. Alan St. Jean, the author of four picture books and four chapter books came to visit us at the Early Elementary on Tuesday.  

 

He talked with us about the writing process, about how long it takes him to write a book and where he gets his ideas from. 

He showed us how his books all have a problem and a solution and that making the solution unpredictable is part of what makes a great children's book. 

 

He showed us some of the early sketches of his character, Ralphie, and we learned that even illustrators make a lot of drafts before they make the perfect drawing!

Mr. St. Jean uses the same writing process we are learning!  He starts with an idea, practices his story (even drawing a quick sketch of the beginning, middle and end sometimes) and writes many drafts with revisions before he is done with the story! 

We learned a lot from this author and hope that someday we have our names on the cover of a book too! 

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Blogging with the BUGS

on desember 25 is cherismis i wont a ds game i am  exsitid for cherismis -by Prestyn



I was a vampire for hollowen. My baby sister was born in janawary 19.I was the first baby in my family.I Iive with my mom, my dad, my brother, my gramma,my grampa,my big sister.I love techer.I love myself. - by Sophie

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Blogging by the BUGS!

Hi I am Emma.A and last night I had lots of fun .I went to my friends house.His name is calub.My cousin Presly came over to his house.I got to go trick or treating with them.I was a monster for Halloween.I had fun!We had lots of candy!Today I am going trick or treating a gen.

 

My name is Tyler i went trick or treating last night with my friend,s Jack Samy and airin.And i also went with my sister named Ava.

 

October 31 was Hallaween. It raind last year and this year. We had lots of diffrint costrum`s. My farit thing abowt Hallaween is to see all the costrum`s - by Maya

 

on october 31 was Halloween. i was a vampier.  By Prestyn

 

Yesterday on Halloween We Had  A Party  It Was Fun We Watched Something About Ice Age MeltDown My Faverite Character is Digeo Because He Is A Tiger. - by Jaylen

 

 

 

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Computer Lab - a Sneak Peek

We use computers a lot in our classroom.  We use them at math stations every day to practice our math concepts and facts.  We use them to take AR tests for reading comprehension assessment.  But we love to go to the lab on Friday mornings and just have some fun!  We can play any of the educational games on the school computers or we can use the time to blog!  Our computer lab has 26 computers, so one student gets to sit at the teacher's desk so we can all join in the fun!  (Mrs. Koehn doesn't mind!)

Despite having been the computer lab teacher several years ago, Mrs. Koehn feels pretty useless when we are in the lab!  We all help each other navigate to the games we want to play, help figure out the math problem that will get us to the third level and even remind each other where to find the log in and password to get to the class blog!  We are all so techie, we don't even need a teacher (most of the time!)

We love to play Sumdog with our friends!  This game lets us practice our math and reading skills while playing against kids in our class, our town or around the world!

Some of us like to do the word find games! 

While others of us like to put our own words out on the blog!  Today, Prestyn helped Maya to spell "different".  He's been working on learning how to spell that word for the spelling test this week and he was eager to share his knowledge!!

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Happy Halloween!

On Thursday afternoon, our room transformed itself from a room full of BUGS to a room full of werewolves, swamp things, minions and vampires!  Here's a look at our Halloween costume party!

Prestyn the vampire, Dylan the Knight in Shining Armor, Cameron the werewolf and Orrin the dinosaur.

 

Tyler and Ian were ninjas, Billy the spider, Abigail the cat and Maya the monkey!

 

Kaylee the rock star, Emma K. a bumblebee, Emma A. a crazy monster, Kolleana a rock star and Zoie a bumblebee!

Evan was a vampire alien, Jaylen as Pikachu and Hunter was Robin Hood.

 

Macy was a pirate (see her great pirate face?  Arrrggg!), Teagen the minion, Sophie the vampire and Avery was Catwoman.

Sydney the mermaid, Jose the ninja and James was Swampthing!

Despite the pouring rain, we enjoyed our parade through the classrooms and our party afterwards!

 

We played some Halloween BINGO and listened to the Monster Mash!

 

We ate ourselves silly and had some great laughs with friends!

A huge thanks to all the parents, grandparents and friends who helped bring items for our party, get us into costume and sing along with the Ghostbusters theme song!  We had a great day today and we couldn't have done it without all your help!

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Magical Moments

We started off our Halloween morning with a visit from Alan Kazam! a local magician.  He reminded us how to handle a bully, how to be a hero and how to have some fun with magic!  He put on a great show for us and kicked off our Halloween day with lots of giggles!

We watched as Mrs. Dahlinger's head seemed to shrink right before our eyes!

We all enjoyed seeing Mr. Alan Kazam make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich appear in a bag from two plain pieces of bread!  We loved seeing his wand fly through the air and we all laughed when the two rabbits multiplied in a closed fist!

 

 

 

 

But best of all, we loved seeing our own Evan as a magician's assistant, helping Mr. Kazam up on stage.  We learned that if you take:  H- honor, honesty and helpfulness; E - energy, enthusiasm and effort; R - responsibility, respect and resourcefulness; and O - obedience and outstanding courage and put them all together...
You get an everyday HERO!  (Like our Evan!)

Thanks, Mr. Kazam, for teaching us some great life lessons through  magic!  We loved your show, and we hope you will come back again!

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Reading Stations - A Sneak Peek

Every day for reading stations, we work on our reading fluency and decoding skills in a variety of ways. 

We spend twenty minutes choral reading with students that are at our same reading level.  Choral reading means we all read the same text at the same time.  This allows not only our eyes to recognize words and our mouths to produce the words, but for our ears to hear the words being said as well.  If we come to unfamiliar words, one of our peers might already know the word and we will hear them say it and read it with our eyes and keep right on going, increasing our familiarity with the word until we are able to read it ourselves! 

We also spend time in small reading groups with Mrs. Koehn and Mrs. Stine to practice our reading comprehension and decoding skills.  Mrs. Koehn and Mrs. Stine help us to learn how to compare fiction with nonfiction; identify characters and settings along with the main topic of a story; we learn about glossaries and captions and how they help us as a reader; we also discuss the components of a story and how the author provided information or entertainment for a reader.  These discussions help us become better readers and writers!

Our third station is seatwork.  This is a time when we practice a decoding or writing skill.  Abigail and Kolleana think they are just having some fun coloring a cute Halloween page, but they are actually coloring by parts of speech!  They had to identify articles (and color them red), distinguish proper nouns from common nouns (and color them black or blue) and find adjectives and prepositions as well!  These activities help build vocabulary, improve writing techniques and even help with capitalization! 

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