A Little of This and a Little of That

Busy, busy, busy just about sums up my winter so far.  A snow day here, another snow day there, too.  I took a bunch of pictures before I left my classroom today because upon looking up from my table I thought to myself, "There's a lot going on here!"  As a result, this post was born.

I'm really liking my new part of my dry erase board where I "post" my objectives.  Before, I had them typed out and would switch them out of clear pocket charts--a real pain.  They had to be refiled which means they were kept in a pile.  To fix this, I hung some letters with ribbon and clothespins.  I added a border and magnetic signs for each subject and viola.  I can erase and change my "We Can!" statements in just a few seconds.  Waaaaay easier.

We are well into our Lucy Calkins unit on Opinion Writing--I'm a big fan of her ideas, her language and her overall philosophy on how to teach writing.  The only problem I have, though, is that I have no more room to hang her anchor charts!  Completely out of room this afternoon, I had no choice but to hang a chart on my bookshelf--it's actually the perfect fit.  Don't you think?

  

On my writing bulletin board we are still enjoying our New Year's project of mine--"Ringing in the New Year."  Our resolutions are not only radiant.  They look pretty nice on display.  Check out this item by clicking HERE.

In science, we are studying matter.  In particular, we are learning about changing states.  We have two ongoing experiments with evaporation happening in our classroom.  Both are so easy and oh so interesting.  Today is day 73 of our evaporating orange water experiment.  All we did was fill an old snack jar with water and food coloring and made predictions on how many days it would take for the water to completely evaporate.  We have been marking its evaporation every so often.  Here's what we have so far.  Boy, this is taking much longer than I had expected.  You can see by my guess of 80 days.

We also started an evaporation race.  I put an equal amount of water in four different containers with four different sized openings.  I measured the water right in front of my young scientists.  We made predictions as to which container would cause the water to evaporate the quickest.  We are watching carefully for the winner.

Moments ago, I uploaded my newest item--  A Bloom's Taxonomy Jar.  I put color coded prompts for each of Bloom's level on large craft sticks in a spray-painted, recycled can (I added some fun accents).  I haven't used these yet, but I plan to send my students off with a prompt to write about after a guided reading lesson.  We will see how this works.  You may get this item by visiting my TpT store or by clicking HERE.  It also comes with a ladder visual to use in explicit instruction regarding the levels of questioning.

Well that's all my pictures.  I hope you have been able to be inspired!