Nothing too much to update on from Room 106 today, but tomorrow is 100th Day of school and I am SO. EXCITED.  Call me crazy, but I actually have jitters.  My kiddos are pretty pumped, too :)

A full update coming after tomorrow's festivities--hoping to fill every second of the day with a hundred!

99 Days of  Room 106 love,

Allie

Hump Day came quickly this week!  I can't believe we're more than half-way over with this week...whew!  What happened in our class today?  Well......

Sideways
Do you ever feel like sometimes your life is just a little bit tilted?  Well, life actually was tilted in Room 106 today.  During one of my reading groups, I did a quick scan of the room and looked over to see one of my students with his head cocked completely to the side--like, perpendicular to the way it's supposed to be.  And then I looked past him and at the computer screen, and sure enough, the orientation was 90 degrees counter-clockwise!  Even after restarting the computer, it was still crooked, so we retired it for the day...

Books, books, books!
Some of what we've been reading:

Measurement...

...measurement...

...and more measurement!  (And I didn't even realize until today that I had picked up so many Steve Jenkins book at the library this weekend!  His illustrations are awesome and very real.  The kiddos loooovveeeedddd him!)

C'mon--how could a kid not love pictures like this?!?  This page is a giant squid eye--the actual size of one!

Another money book.  My kids know and love the bunnies (Max and Ruby), so this was a hit.

More money!  Was I the last one to realize that David Adler has written dozens and dozens of books??  I knew him mostly as an author of social studies texts/biographies, but he writes the whole she-bang!

  

Who could forget Little Bear?  We're still doing an author study on Else Holmelund Minarik, so this week, we are visiting Grandma and Grandpa Bear :)

Ah, Patricia Polacco...I love to squeeze her into lessons when I get a chance!  Her books are lengthy, so this one took us two days to finish, but Just in Time, Abraham Lincoln is a great--and real--collection of facts about Honest Abe and his contributions to the United States during the Civil War.

Speaking of Abe...
While we were reading Polacco's Just in Time, Abraham Lincoln, I took a couple of minutes to talk to the kiddos about the Civil War.  It's tricky to put something like the topic of war into first grade words, so I decided to tell them the story of the Civil War as real as I could, and most actually grasped the ideas of slavery, war, and a divided nation well!

And, of course--as always--a great conversation and six-year-old quotable emerged from it all :)
Student 1: "You mean there used to be slaves?"
Me: "Yes, a long time ago."
Student 2: "Yeah, like, [turns to his classmate] before we were born."
Student 1: "Wait, Ms. Weissberg, was this even before YOU were born?!?"
Me: "Quite some time before I was born."
Student 3: "Whew...then slaves were around a loooooong time ago."

Flattered, as always...




More quotables

- "It's like the north pole out here!"  (When walking outside for recess yesterday and a gust of wind blew a student's jacket open)

- "Don't take that off, Ms. Weissberg--it's bad luck!  You can't do that when you're married!"  (I took off a ring I was wearing during math today to measure it with an inch-tile so that we could compare measurements--which is what we're learning about--and apparently today was the first time in the year that I was hitched...how did I not know this?!?)

In closing news, I'm a little disappointed in Mother Nature this year.  I was hoping for a snow day or two (teachers have dreams, too!), but it looks like she's not planning on delivering any of the white stuff to northern Virginia.  (We were supposed to get snow today and it was just rain...)  I plan on wearing my pajamas inside out until it comes, though!

Even without snow,
Love from Room 106,
Allie

Happy Monday!

Today was a really great start to the week--I love when Mondays go like that!  My favorite quotable of the day:

(To set the scene--the class and I had just had a little "reminder" talk about what our manners look like at school and how we act in the hallways...)
Student: "Ms. Weissberg, I know why you tell us about how we're supposed to act at school."
Me: "Oh, really?"
Student: "Well, you know how you love it when we are quiet and walk in a straight line and don't touch the walls?" [I reallllly dislike when the kiddos have their hands all over walls...apparently I haven't kept this a secret!]
Me: "Yes, I love it when you behave like that..."
Student: "Well, it's because you're teaching us all the rules so that we know them when we get big and become teachers, too!"
...and then she skimpered off to the playground.  Sigh--such innocence :)

Books to share
I went to the public library this weekend, and, as always, I got distracted.  What was going to be a quick in-and-out trip (I even made an alphabetized list of books before I got there so I knew just what to look for and where) turned into an hour-ish of exploration and relaxation.  I just sort of "get lost" in libraries, in the best way possible.  And, as if losing yourself in one library isn't enough, I went to two branches this weekend to make sure I got all the books on my list.  Good news: got 'em all!  Here's what we read today:

We're working through our list of famous Americans as part of our Social Studies curriculum; George Washington was last week and now we're on to Abe Lincoln.  I was so impressed this morning when my class made a KWL chart of all the tidbits they already knew about him!  And, always curious, they had some great questions about him and his life.  This morning, we read A Picture Book of Abraham Lincoln by David Adler:

Then, this afternoon we read some more!  Those who say that they can't find ways to incorporate reading into math might just not be looking hard enough, because we find ways in Room 106 all the time :)  With our continuing study of money, we read Stuart J. Murphy's The Penny Pot:

 

And then, moving into our unit on measurement (that we kicked off--successfully!--today), we read a classic Leo Lionni book, Inch by Inch.  I love this book and was hoping my students would as well, and they sure did.  Inch by Inch has some fun birds in it, like a flamingo, heron, and toucan; an inchworm measures all different parts of these birds before meeting a nightingale, who asks the worm to measure its song.  It sparked some great conversation about non-standard measurement and was a fabulous segue into today's lesson!

A Miss Rumphius blog!

A dear friend of mine gave me the book Miss Rumphius a few years ago, and it quickly became one of my favorites.  Its' a beautiful book, with whimsical drawings and a touching ending.  It's about a woman named Alice who dreams of going to faraway places, live by the sea, and to do something to make the world more beautiful; in her lifetime, she does all of these things, and the last thing, making the world a more beautiful place, is the most difficult one.  Please read it if you have not already.

This weekend I stumbled on a blog with the same name as the book, and it was great.  The blog is written by a professor of education, and the title of it, "The Miss Rumphius Effect," was so clever, given the moral of the book.  The blog has great reading lists and a great theme.

One last thing I realized before I sign off: I always type "Ms. W" when I am talking about dialogue in my classroom between my students and myself, but none of them actually call me Ms. W--they all call me Ms. Weissberg!  So from now on, I promise to be more true to form on the blog :)


I hope all of your weeks got off to an equally successful start!

Love from Room 106,
Allie

Happy February!

Wow.  I cannot believe it is February!  Time is flyyyyyiiiiinnnnnggggg in Room 106!

February

When the kiddos got to school yesterday, I had February's calendar all set up, and they were really excited that I had all the number cards up already (reversed, so you can't see the actual numbers).  Typically, we add the numbers as the days come up, and there is always a pattern with the color of the numbers, but this inevitably leads to someone rummaging through a baggie of numbers to find the right one of the right color that follows our pattern.  So--it only took till February, but--I finally solved the problem :)

Also, Leap Day caused quite the discussion!  I got a lot of looks that said, "Ms. W, how can there just be an extra day every couple of years??"  I love moments like this :)

Collections

Sometimes I come home with a pencil behind my ear.  Other days I will find an eraser or math "tool" (pattern block, tile, the occasional Unifix cube) in my pocket.  About once every other week I realize that a kiddo has given me a lunch money reminder when we are leaving the cafeteria--that I always mean to put in their agendas--and I find it when I get home.  I really should put these in some sort of box to see how much I can collect in a year, but I haven't done this.

Well, today, I hit an all-time high in my collections count.  I wore my hair in a bun and somehow, by the end of the day, had a pencil and a pen sticking through it like chopsticks.  However, I didn't know this...and I made it through the grocery store and on a six-mile run when I got home with said writing utensils in my hair.  In addition to this, I also had five pennies and six multi-colored beads in my pocket.  I should really start taking a look in the mirror before I leave school!

Money sing-a-long

Earlier this week we began our math unit on money, so to get the ball rollin' I taught my class a little song about money--it is one that another teacher taught me while I was student teaching in first grade and is really more of a jingle.  At the end of the song it says, "a penny is one, a nickel is five, a dime is ten, and a quarter's twenty-five."  My kiddos picked up on it quickly, and I think it has really helped them grasp the concept of coin value--a tricky one to get, especially in a time when so much of our spending is with credit cards!

Well, today, as the class was picking up indoor recess things and I was setting things up for math, I heard one of my students start singing the money song.  More of a soft murmur, but the next thing I knew, another one was singing along.  Then, it was as if a magic spell had come over my classroom, because all recess games were picked up, every student was sitting on the rug, and there was a sweet harmony of, "a penny is one, a nickel is five..." swirling around my classroom.  I wish I could have bottled up that moment!

Report cards...check!

I thought that maybe after doing my first set of report cards back in November that maybe they got easier and less time-consuming the more you do them, but that was just wishful thinking :)  Regardless--quarter two report cards are done!  Woohoooo!

Little Bear

Time for another author study!  This time it's Else Holmelund Minarik and the Little Bear series.  There is now a television show about Little Bear, so the kiddos have already been exposed to the characters and the stories, but, as one of my students said yesterday, "(sigh) sometimes the stories in the book are just so much better to listen to when a grown-up reads them than they are on TV."  That's all I need to hear to justify my love for reading aloud to children and to give reason to why I do it so often in my classroom...

There are more Little Bear books in the line-up, but so far, we've enjoyed Little Bear and Little Bear's Friend.

This short week that started off with a teacher workday has flown by, and tomorrow's already Friday!  For everyone that's workin' for the weekend, I hope your end-of-the-work-week comes together nicely!

It's nice to be back into the blogging swing of things...fingers crossed that I can keep up this frequency of posts through June :)

Love from Room 106,
Allie