What's the buzz? Neighborhood Maps on Kidspiration!

We were reading "Me on the Map" in class.  Like the girl in the story, we learned to locate our city, our state, our country and our continent.  Then we learned how to read different types of maps.  However the best part of this learning experience came on Thursday.   We used the laptops from our laptop cart to make neighborhood maps on Kidspiration software.  We had so much fun.  We will finish our maps this week!

What's the buzz? AudioBoo!

We are always looking for authentic ways to explore reading, writing and speaking.  We are currently using AudioBoo to support this practice.  AudioBoo lets us create an audio recording.  We began to create audio recordings that featured daily highlights.  At the end of our day we brainstorm and write about the best part of our day.  Then one student creates the audio recording by reading what they wrote.  Our AudioBoo account is linked to our class Twitter account.  We hope to receive feedback from our followers. The conversation on Twitter will help us to see the power of our words.  Stay tuned, we will write more on how this practice helps us to grow as readers, writers and speakers!  You can check out AudioBoo by following this link or you can listen to our "boos" on the side post of this blog.

What's the buzz? The Chinese New Year!

We completed a unit on China this week culminating with a Chinese New Year celebration on January 23rd.  Throughout the unit we learned about Chinese culture.  Perhaps the most interesting part of the unit was learning about the Chinese New Year.  We learned about many of their customs.   We wore red on Monday, January 23rd, since red is the color of good luck.  We celebrated the year of the dragon by making foam dragons.  We wrote our names in Chinese using brushes made from bamboo and black ink.  We made lanterns after learning about the lantern festival.We read Grandfather Tang's Story and created our own tangram pictures.  We read many other books which you can check out on our Shelfari. However the best part was having a celebration which included fried rice, green tea and fortune cookies.  Can you believe that we ate our fried rice with chopsticks!  We had a great time!

Here is a picture of one of our tangrams:

Here is some of our Chinese writing:

Here is one of our dragons:

We hung our red lanterns in the classroom:

A special thanks to all the parents who help with our celebration!