Five for Friday - arrays, snow, shopping, research and a tip!

I couldn't decide on just one thing to blog about this weekend so I'm linking up with Kacy at Doodlebugs for Five for Friday.  Good stuff this week!

 

Not sure how I feel about this... It definitely was pretty and it didn't last long.  But let's just say I'm not ready for this to be happening too often right now.  Snow means boots and snowpants and the craziness of getting everything ON for recess, then coming back in and taking it OFF... not yet, ok?

We finished up our unit on repeated addition with some fun centers.  In the first one everyone is using square tiles to show arrays of a certain number of rows and columns.  This one got a few of my kiddos confused.  It was good to see some kids having no problems figuring it out and others who usually breeze through all things numbers having to really think.  In the end we all got it and it was great to see everyone help each other figure it out. The ipad center was hit.  They used a drawing app to create arrays based on repeated number sentences.  In the third center it was the opposite - write the number sentence to go with the array. (You can get the cards from TPT HERE.)

 

 



This is my second Stitch Fix and I LOVE IT!  I get to try on things I wouldn't normally even look at and I'm finding some great pieces to add to my wardrobe.  That cream sweater is perfect to keep at school for when it gets chilly and the jeans on the bottom are my new faves!

We took out the laptops for our first research project of the year!  Wow - the excitement was amazing and it's so great to see my kiddos really able to use technology so well.  Last week we visited three sites to learn more about nocturnal animals.  As soon as everyone got busy you could hear a pin drop as they all read everything they could.  Then the chatter started - "Did you know....?"  Wow!  Listen to this!"  It warmed my teacher heart!  This week we'll add information from a few books.  I created a research flip book for them to keep track of their facts.  After the research piece, each student will create a slide in Powerpoint with a fact about their animal, photo and caption and a title.  (Snuck a little nonfiction text feature practice in there!)  We are all so excited to see how the final presentation turns out!  (Click HERE for the flip book.)

Here are the sites we used:

As I was cleaning things up on Friday, I realized this little habit I have just might save some of you a little time.  You know all those resources you have that you use parts of all year, ... but sometimes not every week so you forget which one you used and which ones you didn't.... and you copy it and hand it out only to hear "we already did this!"... I started turning the page I used around the other way when I re-filed it after copying so I knew I had already used it.  Now when I go back to my folder I can see at a glance which pages I've used so far.

Be sure to check out Doodlebugs to see what everyone else has been up to this week!