Five for Friday: Moon Craters and Co-op Strip Paragraphs!!

What an amazing week! We were very productive both at school and at home. That always makes me feel energized and effective! Knowing my students were really engaged and learning all week long brings joy to my heart. I am teaming up with doodlebugs'  Five for Friday, although technically it is Saturday!

We started off the week with Reviewing fractions and playing Capture Equivalent Fractions as a review before we head in to some deeper concepts. My kids really enjoyed this and really showed me who was still struggling making matches. They were great about doing the work to solve the cards they weren't sure of!  Your students will love this hands on activity, too.  It is a free download from Math Coach's Corner on TPT.

Studying the Solar System hasn't really given us many opportunities for hands-on experiments, although my 5th graders love when I tell them I can't send them to the moon so we have to create a keynote, iMovie, or Prezi instead.  They really make me laugh! This week was an added treat as we were learning about the moon's surface and great facts like it has no atmosphere, Neil Armstrong's footprint is still there, there are 2 sides, etc. etc.  My team and I decided to make the moon more REAL.  We had students predict what type of space object (marble, big shooter sized marble, golf balls, plastic balls from the quarter machine at grocery stores, rubber bouncy balls, or wiffle balls) would leave the widest crater on the surface of the moon (aluminum pans of flour).  They loved it!!! We had over an hour of total engagement. I am blessed to have a Science Room so all of the extra flour didn't end up in my floor!   Since we are a 1:1 iPad classroom, we have incorporated the usage of them in all curricular areas.  One of the group jobs is to be the recorder, oops make that two jobs.. one for recording data on paper and one for recording the experiment with the iPad camera.  They love when I number them off 1-4 and pull spoons.  Anticipation as to which job will be theirs is visibly noticed!

My district practices G.L.A.D. (Guided Language Acquisition Design) and one of my favorite strategies that I have learned and use all of the time is the Co-op Strip Paragraph.  We recently read Black Cowboy, Wild Horses about a real African-American cowboy named Bob Lemmons. I gave them a non-fiction text to read about cowboys as well as a web site to read.  After reading it, students took notes on what was important to know about topics such as cowboys' daily life, their main job, training, etc. The purpose of this exercise was to get them prepared for a final project essay on cowboys, including Bob and Alice Greenough, another cowgirl biography we read.  I usually begin by writing a topic sentence and then have each table write one sentence together.  This time I decided to let them write their sentences while I orally told them what our expository writing was going to be about. I am so glad I did. One group provided us with a perfect starting sentence as you can see in the picture below.  After they all write the sentences, the class helps me put them in an order that flows and serves our purpose. As they decide which sentence goes next, I tear the strips so that they fit in our pocket chart, or this time, so they would fit on the white board space I had set aside.  The strips are torn so they end up looking like a paragraph fitting in margins. When I am finished, the students and I read the entire paragraph, deciding if we need to move words around, make any verb changes, and check for spelling.  After we wrote the generic paragraph on cowboys, we did it again with Bob as our subject.  Next week each team will write their own paragraph on Alice in a similar fashion and then each student will write their own final paragraph. Students really get engaged with this type of cooperative writing and my struggling writers get the opportunity to see and hear our class work together to write a well-written piece that they can use as a model for their own writing.

My oldest turned 25 this week!!!!! CRAZY how time has flown by! As in typical Susie style, we celebrated all week long, complete with 25 gifts of items that reminded me of her throughout her many styles and years, along with 25 reasons why we love her, dinner with our family and her fiance's family and a night out dancing with her friends.  Happy 25 mija, and may the next 25 be as fulfilling and loving as these past 25 were!

I just love these numbers from Pinkadots Elementary blogspot. Theresa and Robyn are wonderful bloggers and have such great creative activities. I am so honored they let me use their numbers.  Five for this week has got to be thank you God for rain!! California is really in a state of drought and I heard this week that 3 cities may soon be without running water. How does that happen in our world full of technology and all of the amazing minds? Because Mother Nature hasn't provided us with any in a really long time and we all know that humans are destroying our beautiful planet with all of the factories and pollution we are letting off into the environment.  I walked out of my door Friday morning after a day and night of rain and was greeted by one of my favorite roses dressed in drops. Beautiful end to my perfect week!

Hope your week was as fabulous as mine!