Calling All Parent and Student Bloggers!!

Dear Parents and Students,
As some of you may know, I love technology! In fact, I love it so much that I am sharing my knowledge with some of the other teachers this year during our professional development. I was wondering if you could help me out...Several teachers are following our blog. We were having a discussion yesterday about blogs and how they are different from our website.

If you have a free minute, please reply to this post answering any or all of the following questions....What do you love about our blog? What is your favorite part of blogging? How does our blog help you as a parent? as a student? What tips do you have for teachers who are just getting started with blogging? Thank you in advance for your thoughts!

Landform Maps

The students really enjoyed this activity! It was a little crazy yesterday with early release.

Speaking of early release, the teachers all received their new laptops. They are super cool tablets that you can even take notes with. I was having trouble figuring out how to upload pictures so I will be sure to add photos tomorrow. I am also working on getting the ELMO fixed. I promise I have not forgotten about taking digital images of the assignment book. I know how helpful that was for everyone.

Interactive Writing-Tic-Tac-Toe Board

By Chris, Alex, Ethan, Molly, Lucas, and Brock

Our tic tac toe bulletin board has many fun math games to play. There are nine different games to explore. When you complete a game, you x it out on your game board. The object is to play three games in a row just like tic-tac-toe. We worked on several math concepts including place value, problem solving, and patterns. We like the games because they are fun and challenging!

Book Clubs-starting tomorrow!

We will be starting book clubs at school tomorrow. We have finally completed learning about the various jobs. When the children meet, they will be working together to read the same material but each will be completing a different assignment each time the clubs meet. As you already know, we learned about 2 previous roles-discussion director and movie critic.

The new roles we learned today are dialogue director, casting director, and production designer. Check out this movie to learn more about these roles.

Speaking of books...feel free to place orders from our scholastic book order this month. The web address is www.scholastic.com/bookclubs The user name is amoehlmann and the password is pass. Thank you in advance for these orders. The orders are due Sept. 23rd.

Writing

We are ready to take our first writing piece through the writing process. Each student chose his or her favorite piece from their writing journals and is working on typing the first draft. We look forward to sharing these with you.

Interactive Writing-Rock Fun Facts

By Kenneth, Thomas, and Jordyn
In Science, we are learning about rocks and minerals. One day we observed a package of rocks. We took magnifying glasses and looked at the interesting features of the rocks. One feature we noticed was the hardness of the samples. The rocks came in many different shapes, colors, and sizes.

Our Science Explorations with Rocks

Today we started researching rocks in Science. We used the laptops to explore these 3 links.
http://www.diigo.com/list/amoehlmann/science_rocks

What We Learned:
Up to 100,000 tons of rock fall from space to the Earth each year.
The largest Topaz crystal was found in Brazil in 1940. It weighted about 600 pounds.
Heat and pressure can change rocks-we call this metamorphic change.
Limestone is made from dead skin of sea animals.
Rocks have different hardness.
There are 3 types of rocks-igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic.
Crystal is the hardest type of rock.
Most rocks are made from minerals.
Some rocks contain fossils.
The oldest rock is in Canada.