A Fairy Tale Drama Circle

What a FUN activity THIS was!!  I found this activity on Teachers Pay Teachers (from one of my favorite sellers Jen Runde) and I LOVE it!  We had a ball performing this mixed up fairy tale.  We switched cards around and did it a few times – each one funnier than the last.  The theatrics were fantastic!  When we finished performing, we started to WRITE our own ideas.  This was just as fun!  What a talented group of kids.  I can’t wait to see what they come up with!  YahoOOoOO! 

Important Dates (including testing dates!):

Monday (or Tuesday), April 11th - Spring T-shirt Sale

Friday, April 15th - UMS trip to the Michigan Theatre

Friday, April 29th - NWEA (reading)

Monday, May 2nd - NWEA (math)

Tuesday, May 3rd - NO SCHOOL (closed for voting)

Wednesday, May 4th - FIELD TRIP - AA Water Treatment plant/Barton Dam

Monday, May 9th - Student of the Day begins (see below for details)

Tuesday, May 10th - MSTEP

Wednesday, May 11th - MSTEP

Friday, May 12th - MSTEP

Wednesday, May 18th - MSTEP

Thursday, May 19th - MSTEP

Friday, May 20th - Walk-A-Thon

Thursday, May 26th - FIELD TRIP - Lake Erie Trip - kids need to be at school by 7:45am

Wednesday, June 1st - FIELD TRIP - Ann Arbor Farmer's Market

Friday, June 3rd - Ice Cream Social

Last week:  FIELD TRIP - Vet's Pool

Friday, June 17th - Pancake Breakfast and our LAST DAY!  :(

STEM!

This was a quick challenge STEM activity.  The challenge:  Using 1 yard of tape and a small pile of newspapers, create a tower that will hold a basketball.  What a fun challenge!  With their partner, they discussed ways to make the tower and learned about a very important concept (and vocabulary word) STRUCTURE.  Without it, our towers did not hold up the basketball! 

What worked?  What didn’t work?  What helps make the structure stronger?  What do we know about structures from our last STEM activities?  Failure to create a structure to hold the basketball doesn’t mean we failed…it just means we need to rethink what we do next time. 

Camp Read-A-Lot

There’s NOTHING better than getting to wear your jammies to school.  Wait, there IS something better!  Wearing your jammies and having your entire classroom covered in pillows, stuffed animals, and sleeping bags!  Oh, and eating all day.  Yup.  That describes Friday perfectly.  Kids had a great time writing poetry and doing math rotations in the morning, and reading (or being read to) most of the afternoon.  We had s’mores (who knew they were so yummy, straight out of the microwave!?), fruit, veggies, and popcorn.  It was wonderful.  YahooOoo!  Kids brought bags (and suitcases!) full of books to read.  They shared books with one another, read to each other, and it was SO great seeing them so excited about reading.  Thank YOU so much for providing such a spread!  They LOVED eating all day.  :)  Bravo!

Exploration Station

On Thursday, we traveled to Canton to the Exploration Station.  Kids played a game about drugs and alcohol.  Kids were able to phone a friend (like Who Wants to be a Millionaire), poll the audience (everyone gets to vote for the answer they think is correct) and 50/50 (two of the wrong answers are removed).  They did a great job and were able to answer the questions really well.  There was also role playing – teaching them ways to say no to peer pressure, and they saw a set of pink pig lungs along with a set of not-so-pink pig lungs (the lungs were subjected to smoke, but kids giggled at the thought of a pig smoking. J)  After they played the game, they were able to play in the human body play structure.  It was great!