Now on Bloglovin!

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

I'm super excited to share that I've claimed my blog on Bloglovin!

I will be back soon with more posts, just wanted to share :)

Rock on,

Diana 

Five For Friday

I'm linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for Five for Friday! Here's my top 5 for the week.

Last week we had our elf on the shelf Bruno join our class. I'm at a new school this year so he took a little longer to find us, perhaps because someone's garage was a little unorganized.. But none the less he has been moving all over our room and cracking up kiddos like usual.

We were a little worried how Stubs would react to sharing his tank but they seemed to become great friends! :)

Despite the craziness of the last week before break, my students have still been very motivated to practice their multiplication and division facts! I love how filled up our monster is, we needed to introduce a new one! Each time a student passes a math fact they add to the monster. It's funny to see how our monster grows and even has teeth on its feet HA!

I've also dusted off my circuit machine to livin up the room a bit. I wanted to make my focus board a little more cohesive yet simple. The message should be clear and consise for my students and for visitors to see what we're learning. I think it's really coming along!

Not only is my classroom getting a makeover but so are my nails! I just got the jamberry gel enamel system as a Christmas gift and I'm in LOVE! It really stays on there, so next time I'll be a little more careful and stay in the lines :) If you haven't tried Jamberry wraps or the gel enamel it really is the lazy girl solution to great looking nails. Coming from someone who goes to school with wet hair and half my makeup on, this is something I can keep up with!

..and let's not forget, IT'S OFFICIALLY CHRISTMAS BREAK!!!!!! Looking forward to the next 17 days of no alarms!

Link up with Doodle Bugs Teaching to share 5 exciting thoughts from your week! 

Rock on,

Diana

Reindeer Race! A forces and motion experiment!

When faced with the impossible feat of teaching an actual science lesson days before break, just bring in the reindeer! "Real reindeer?!?!" a student asked... no.. I'm not that good ha! We had a lot of fun with this experiment today though and explored how force affects distance and how gravity can affect motion.

Our first experiment was to race three reindeer going at different inclines. One reindeer was going up, another was going straight or level, and the final reindeer was going downwards. Before the buzzer sounded, we discussed which one we think might win and go the farthest. Most students felt it would be the reindeer going down, because it's easier going downhill. We just couldn't explain why, not yet anyway.

The race began and guess what?! That reindeer going down hill went about 5 inches.. WHAT?! I'm frantically thinking "oh great, a dud". We tried it again.. same result!! This just can't be right though, we really thought he would win! But wait, I notice the straw we used had the ridges on it from where it can bend. I bring this to my students attention and something amazing happened. One kiddo piped in, "Those ridges probably made more friction because it's not as smooth and slowed it down!" Oh friends, I could have cried. YES! I THINK YOU'RE RIGHT!! So we switched out the straw and it worked like a charm. We had a good talk about how scientists and even teachers (whahhhht?) can make mistakes. The beautiful thing is we learned something neat from our mistake.

The next experiment was to blow up balloons at three different sizes- small, medium, and large. The string this time all stayed level. We let the reindeer race again and measured the distance each one traveled. Students then paired up with a partner to discuss how the bigger balloon had more force to push the reindeer down the string.

To reflect on what we learned from the experiments students answered a writing prompt using their conclusions from their experiment recording sheets. These kiddos were so engaged and curious, they wanted to know what would happen if we made some of the balloons heavier than the others or filled some with water. I love to see their little gears turning!

If you'd like to try out these experiments with your class you can check out my product here. It also includes interactive notebook flaps and graphs the students can complete with their observations. I wish we had the time to graph our results! Time just flew by as we did our reindeer races :)

Click HERE for the link!

Merry Christmas! & rock on,

Diana

Five for Friday

It's been a fun and hectic week! We're getting into the Christmas spirit at home and in the classroom so it's just been a lot of fun and excitement all week long :)

Like I said, I've been getting into the Christmas spirit and nothing does that like cookies!

The tree is also up with a special ornament!

When I was in 8th grade I gave one of my favorite teachers a pickle ornament and shared the tradition of hiding it in the tree. I now teach her daughter and when she gave me this gift of my very own pickle she was smiling ear to ear! And so was I!! 

We also welcomed back Bruno!

As you can see, he got a little lost (like where was he hiding! I'd like to know too because I spent a lot of time looking -_-) but luckily he found his way to my new school and the children have been over the moon about his adventures around our classroom this week. He even scribbled al over my science board.. Oh Bruno.

Our school was chosen to be a part of the teacher rewards program that Walmart does. Each teacher received a $50 gift card to use for their classroom!! I knew exactly what we needed.

We have a cube organizer holding up our fish tank, and it works beautifully. It's sturdy but compact, because space is an issue. Storage is an issue too, so it was a no brain-er that we could use another one for all of our books!

They look so snazzy together 😄

In personal news, I've become an old lady... But a fashionable one I'd like to think.

I learned to knit over thanksgiving and made this beauty! It's very warm and I love how chunky it is! I even had a kiddo ask me to teach them to knit during recess yesterday. Warmed my heart!

In farm news, because I usually talk about my goats, I needed to give the chickens some credit. We have an olive egger in the bunch! One chicken just started laying these beautiful dark green eggs! 

Off to make some omlets before school. Remember, after today, 3 1/2 days left till break!!!!!!!

Rock on,

Diana

Organizing with command hooks

At any given point in time I have at least two packages of command hooks stashed away in my desk drawer. I believe there are so many great uses for these nifty hooks and I keep finding new uses! Here's just a few of the ways I organize my classroom with command hooks.

We use timers to practice our math facts but when they were placed in a basket the cords kept getting tangled. Hanging the hooks right where our centers are kept worked perfectly and no tangled cords!

During math technology students use Moby Max, so in case they forget their username or password all of the cards are on a ring and kept on the other side of the math center bookcase. We also use Seesaw, a great way for us to safely share our work and comment on other students work using our tablets. It's hanging on a hook because it can be flipped around for Block 2's QR code to scan. 

Ok, there isn't command hooks here but there was fresh paint on the walls so they wouldn't stick. Otherwise I wouldn't have made holes in the wall.. Whoops! So this is a hook and claw clip combo- AMAZING. Yes I get this excited about claw clips. This is our anchor chart so I regularly take it down to hang a new poster up. This makes it easy to move back and forth without a bulky stand. 

The clips may be a little difficult to see here but they're holding up all of these envelopes. These envelopes have coupons in them that my students can buy with their "dojo cash". We do a classroom economy where good behavior and completing quality work gets them cash to shop. However all of the things to buy are more experiences than material things. I like that it connects doing the right thing with a warm fuzzy feeling :) Anywho, my students are such sweeties and hard workers so they shop pretty frequently, making this system of envelopes on hooks pretty easy to manage and see all of their buying options. 

So that does it folks! Do you use command hooks or other nifty things to organize your classroom? Comment and share!

Rock on,

Diana

Five for Fraturday

What a crazy week! October in general has been busy with report cards, conferences, fall festival, and science fair quickly approaching. We've also started multiplication and timed tests on their facts which is very new for my third graders. Luckily this past week was loaded with fun stuff so we made it through :) So here's my 5 for Friday (or Fraturday rather) and my link up with Doodle Bugs Teaching! Check out their blog at http://doodlebugsteaching.blogspot.com/

First thing I want to chat about are our awesome tablets we got through a donors choose project. We were very fortunate to be funded for 3 Amazon Fire tablets and 2 iPad minis, bringing us to 9 total tablets in my classroom. This week was our first chance on them and with so many I could have each child in a small group on a tablet. The kiddos got to make tellagamis to explain math vocabulary, tweet about multiplication, and scan QR codes to self correct. They loved it!

We also used the tablets to research for their engineering projects! With the science fair quickly approaching my students were introduced to the engineering design process. What better time than the week of Halloween! Our first project was candy corn towers. I do not want to wish this project on my worst enemy... I saw the idea on Pinterest and candy corn is definitely not the ideal building material. But hey, it was perfect for the "improve and redesign" step of the design process LOL! The other project we engineered was a catapult. Now THOSE were a HIT! The "problem" they were facing was how to launch a candy corn pumpkin the farthest possible distance. We took time researching catapults and different designs with various materials. They planned their designs and put it into action. After each team launched their pumpkin we graphed the distances. 

Monday we'll do some math with the results finding the difference between first and last place and also the total distance from all 6 teams. It's been a blast!

Totally random note here, I saw this book from the Math Coaches Corner and I was so pumped about it I went right on over to Amazon and got it. "Building Mathematical Comorehension- Using Literacy Strategies to Make Meaning" by Laney Sammons.

I'm only on chapter 2 but I'm loving it so far. I'm noticing some of my students are having trouble visualizing the difference between addition and multiplication. We draw pictures to demonstrate the situation in the word problem but I'm looking forward to some fresh insight from this book and incorporating it in my lessons as we explore multiplication and division more. 

While working on word problems and multiplication techniques we are also starting to work on multiplication fluency and memorizing their times tables facts. We take a 1 minute timed test and when they pass they move onto the next fact. I've been thinking of a way to motivate students to move onto the next facts without doing a clip chart sort of thing that shows what children are behind. So in comes the multiplication monster! 

Each time they pass a fact they can add an eyeball, arm, antenna, tooth or spike to the monster with their name on it. They have love this! We can't wait to see our monster grow :) 

Last but not least it's Halloween! Us teachers have to have a little fun too and spook the kids hahaha. The kids have launched an investigation as to who is placing these creepy dolls in our classroom.