Hands-On Learning

Welcome!  I hope everyone had a fantastic weekend!!  It was so beautiful out, I just can not believe summer is coming to an end!  On the other hand, it means more time with my students, getting to know each other and beginning our 4th grade learning!

We had a very busy day today!  We began the morning comparing differences between maps and globes.  The best way to do this was get out our globes and work with them.  The purpose was to compare continents and oceans on a map and globe.  We also located the equator and prime meridian and discussed how our Earth is divided into four different hemispheres.  I thought students did very well!  For a more detailed description view our Content Workshop page.

Our class studying globes and maps.

Giving a thumbs up because we know a location!

This afternoon we welcomed Mrs. Johnson back to our classroom.  Like this morning, diving into our maps and globes, we dove into our books.  We have not opened our classroom library this year because we have been working on procedures for coming in and out of the library.  Mrs. Johnson and I want students to have a really good understanding of the books in our library so by taking the time to build the excitement of reading those books, we find students are more invested in learning about them.

When Mrs. Johnson came in she asked the students to decide how our books were organized up to this point.  Currently they know we have fiction and nonfiction books.  After creating a definition for what we mean by fiction and non-fiction, we gave each student a bin of books to look through.  They had to decide if the bin was for fiction or non-fiction books and finally write down 5 books out of that bin they would be interested in reading.  Check out the Reading and Writing Workshop tab for more information!

Mrs. Johnson is creating our anchor chart for bin color.

Ohh...Look at this one!!!  Checking out the bins!

In other exciting classroom news, we now have three white cloud fish in our purple tank and a new blue guarmi in a new tank.  He was bought to be friends with our other fish, but they did not know how "to live above the line"! 

Happy Bloggin!