Norski Graduates

This morning, some of DeForest's graduates that attended Eagle Point came back to visit.  We went out to congratulate them and wish them well on their next journey after high school.  It was great to see some old friends now all grown up!

A New Book

We would like to give the Fitterer family a big thank you for our latest book!  Everyone was really excited to get a copy of a new book from one of our favorite series, Calendar Mysteries.  (We are currently loving many of the A to Z Mysteries books.)  Thank you again for our new book!

Publishing Our Poems

Today, the class started using Google Slides to type in a favorite poem that each person wrote during Writer's Workshop time.  We will continue logging in, getting into the Google program, and finding our Slides Presentation on the Chromebooks for the next several days in order to each publish a poem.  After everyone has done this, we will put together the poems into a book for everyone to keep. 

Junior Achievement

We spent several hours over Friday, May 17 and also Friday, May 24 having a visitor from Junior Achievement.  Miss Aleah taught us some lessons on wants and needs, saving and borrowing, and earning and paying taxes.  Here, the students are working together to make "donuts" to see how many correctly made donuts each group could make in the time allowed.

Later, Miss Aleah inspected our donuts to look for defects and gave each group credit for the number of correctly produced donuts they had made.

Dr. Trixie's Office

Reading Series Books

These were taken from the new Reading Workshop Unit of Reading Series Books.  Here, you see two people reading their series book and getting ready to meet in their book group.  They are collecting information about the characters and noticing how they respond to problems in the story.

This is a book group meeting to talk about their series book.  Each student read a 'Trixie' book.  They each took turns to share their thoughts on the characters, and then compared the character's traits between different books.

This is a group discussing their ideas about the characters of an Iris and Walter book.

The Big Hill

We made the best of a rainy day and had the Big Hill come to us!  We did all the activities we would have had, just inside.  Here Mr. Hopping is showing us diagrams of different creatures found in the pond.

We talked about birds with Mrs. Rowe.  We looked at the birds she brought, and then talked about the different kinds of beaks.  

Here, we examined animal skulls and talked about what kind of animal the skull must have belonged to.  We made observations about the teeth to help us make a guess of which animal it could be.

"Fishing" in the "pond". 😊 The teachers fished for us and brought over a big collection of creatures for us to examine.  We were able to use the finders to see them up close.

We even held a leech!

EEK!  I am always surprised how fast time flies each May- especially since we've been keeping busy!  ☺  I've been taking lots of photos along the way with our activities.  Stay tuned while I play "catch up" on our last 2 weeks.  Thanks for your patience with me!!  😊

Using Our "Poet" Eyes

This past week, we began our work in our Poetry writing unit.  We learned about using our "poet's" eyes.  This means that we try to look "beyond" the actual object and think about what the object could be like.  ie:  A cotton ball is like a cloud, a pillow, and a marshmallow.  

Each table got a tub of objects (shells, ping pong balls, rocks, etc.)  Then each student chose an object to write about.  We tried to use many of our 5 senses when describing the object (how it looks, feels, sounds, ...).