Reading Rodeo

February is "I Love to Read" month. In Milaca, Mrs. Vickers, our media specialist, and a team of staff members work hard for months to prepare and develop incentives to encourage, support, and reward reading within our school. We start each year with a pepfest in our gyms.

Our 1000-plus members in our elementary school

we enjoyed some singing

 Principal Voshell played drums, fifth grade teacher Mr. Anderson played guitar and sang, fifth grade teacher Mr. Follmuth played guitar and sang, also lead by third grade teachers Mrs. Barry and Mrs. Hakes-Anderson. Some sixth grade students, directed by Assistant Principal Meyer joined in to lead the school.

Principal Voshell played drums, Mr. Follmuth, M

It was a fun school event!

Expression

When we returned to school in the beginning of January, Ms. Leom's Flex group was studying Fairy Tales. We read many fairy tales stories in the traditional version. A few weeks ago, we shared some of our favorites with our kindergarten reading buddies. Then we read The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales. We were able to enjoy this silly book, because we could compare the silly version to the more traditional stories. It is a fun story, and it really gives us an opportunity to work on reading with expression and reading fluently. We read The Stinky Cheese Man once together as a class. Once on our own to enjoy and reread the parts we liked best. Today, Ms. Leom's homeroom read The Stinky Cheese Man to our kindergarten friends, using our best reading voices. We are improving our reading expression. :)

Dictionary 20.14

During Flex Reading today, there were four people absent from school and four others in the computer lab taking or finishing up their MAP Reading and MAP Math testing from earlier in the week. Half the class is not the best day to "teach" a lesson. So we picked up the iPad cart (beginning to REALLY love this cart of tools) and brought it into class.

Ms. Leom quickly modeled how to use the Notes App and look up words, and we were off and learning!

Another amazing benefit of iPads, using iPads to look up definitions takes half the time as using a dictionary. Many times, we may have to check one or even two dictionaries for our word. The iPad also automatically searches for correct spellings, which speeds up the process too!

It is HOW big?!

We are reading about dinosaurs. The first page told us that the Tyrannosaurus Rex is 15 feet high and 40 feet long. As successful readers as we all are ... we aren't able to just "read" this line and keep reading -- without stopping to clarify and comprehend what this means. So if the average fourth grader is about 5 feet tall ... we could visualize the size of a Tyrannosaurus Rex ...

3 fourth graders high = about 15 feet

8 fourth graders long = about 40 feet

Jammin'

Today, Ms. Leom received an email from one of our Phy-Ed teachers, Mrs. Beckmann:

Hello Everyone,

I just wanted to suggest that teachers/paras try to fit in some exercise during these days where there is no outside recess and sometime no physical education class as well.  I am sending out the 7 minute workout again.  I know I bug you all a lot about getting our students active, but it is even more important when their chances to be active are taken away due to weather.  It is proven that students are able to focus better and concentrate longer when given opportunities to get small, short burst of activity throughout the day. 

Please take 3, 5 or 7 minutes to get your students active today, if possible. Here is the 7-minute workout that you could put up on your boards during recess and don't forget about all the JAMmin' Minutes on the server.  Have a great day and don't forget to be active.  :) 

The 7-Minute Workout

Take 7 minutes every day to tone and increase cardiovascular fitness with this effective routine that uses your own body strength.

These exercises should be done in order for 30 seconds each with just 10 seconds of rest in between each move.
        Jumping jacks
        Wall sits
        Push ups
        Abdominal crunches
        Step ups onto a chair
        Squats
        Triceps dips with chair
        Plank
        High knees/run in place
        Lunges
        Push ups & rotations
        Side planks

We LOVE how our entire staff is watching out for all of our students and their success!! So after lunch, Ms. Leom started out with our favorite episode of the Jammin' Minute (when we were featured during the second week of school).

Our opening

Mrs. Beckmann's introduction

Look at these new fourth graders!

Jammin' before we started our afternoon learning!

Excavation

Today in Ms. Leom's Flex Reading groups started our Digging up Tyrannosaurus Rex learning. It is a nonfiction book.

 To get a "feel" for our author's experience, we excavated "fossils" (chocolate chips) from the "overburden" (cookies), using highly "expensive" tools (toolpicks).

As a seasoned teacher of eighteen years, I routinely use our current vocabulary words throughout the day to model our words. This guidance is helpful, as research indicates students need to hear a new vocabulary word used 8-12 times to retain it and add it to their vocabularies. We were intrepid learners and paleontologists today in Flex Reading. Undoubtedly this is one of my favorite learning activities of the year, but you will have to ask your student their opinion (later next week, we will be learning about facts and opinions).  Students were encouraged to make sure their fossils were pristine from dirt. They were told the overburden example they were given was fragile. In the real world, paleontologists wouldn't be able to hoist their sample, because it would be too heavy. It is a privilege to read interesting books and experience simulations of what we are reading with a little imagination and delectable learning materials. I hope these will be the memories my students cherish from their fourth grade experience!

In the end, students were asked to throw out their excavation site. They munched on a cookie as we talked about at a real excavation site, paleontologists often work in extreme heat, sun, and other weather conditions for long hours and sometimes years at a time for one excavation. The fossils are priceless, created over hundreds of thousands of years, and if one is broken, it can not be replaced. In the coming weeks, we will be learning about what we thought we know about dinosaurs, were really only guesses (we don't really know what color dinosaurs were, we've never found skin to know for sure). The BEST part of our learning experience, is when we travel to the Science Museum of Minnesota on our fourth grade field trip and get to see the dinosaur replicas on display. Let the excavation of learning begin!!