Brummitt's High Ability Blog Spot: Summer Is Almost Here!!!

Well I am a little sad as I write this because I know that this is the second to last blog I will post. Next week will be my last week with students and I have some great fun activities planned.

I will miss all my students and their bright smiling faces. They always come into class excited and ready to learn and that makes my job so much easier.

There were some fun things that happened this week at Brummitt. Some of the students got to celebrate their success with Book It.

The Kindergarten students that completed their Book It sheets for all of the months got to enjoy lunch with Miss Watson. I am sure they had lots of fun. The Fourth Grade went on a field trip to the Porter County Expo Center for an awesome adventure.

There were lots of students from Brummitt who had art work at the Chesterton Art Center for the annual event. I attended with my family and got to meet some of my students’ cool parents. It was an exciting event full of art.

I took some pictures and am posting so you can see just some of all the beautiful artwork that is there. The show will continue until the 25^th. It was very crowded that night, but so worth going. We are still working on our Life Skills and this week we are working on Friendship.

The students are great at this because they are working in their teams to complete their secret projects. They always do such an excellent job to include each other in every aspect of making the decisions and designs. They really are all so close and are good friends to each and every classmate. I also reminded them to fill out life skill slips for each other because we will be having our last drawing next week.

High Ability groups for next year are pretty much set except for second grade. If they are currently in for kindergarten, first or third grade then they will continue in the high ability program next year. Second grade tends to be a bit of a shakeup year, now that we have recent data due to CogAT.

No decisions have been made for second grade. The High Ability committee will wait for the rest of the data to be in before making the final decisions. I will let you know at the end of this school year as soon as I know.

Language Arts:

Kindergarten:

This week the students learned more about connections and our feelings. We read a book called Walter Was Worried by Laura Vaccaro. This book let students share their feelings and learn what is like to worry and to be scared.

We discussed how our feelings and others feelings can change depending on the situation. We also discussed how during a storm some people may be scared and others might be excited.

Since we had a little time left we played with the story dice and told about some great adventures.

First Grade:

This week we continued with Hieroglyphs. Our sand stones had some issues drying out and got furry over the weekend. So I decided we could try something else to see if it could work. I brought in clay and the students created new stones with hieroglyphs on them.

I am drying them out and they will be able to take them home next week. They had so much fun using the clay to create their own stone. They students also had to write 10 words to describe themselves. They had to put them in order of most important to least important. They used some great words to describe themselves. I am very proud of them. We also worked very hard on our surprise that will be posted next week in a special blog. Next week will be all about fun with some awesome activities.

Second Grade:

This week we continued to work on the hamburger model and writing a persuasive paragraph. We took both days to finish up on the last part of the assessment which was persuasive writing. I am proud of how hard all the students worked on completing their assessments and trying their best. Next week we will finish up with the Great Mouse Detective and have some fun.

Third Grade:

This week we finished watching Alice in Wonderland. I want to thank Sophia and her family for letting use their video. The students continued to take notes on what they found was different from the book, once we finished the movie we created a Venn Diagram to see what the differences were between the movie and the book.

They loved it because they all got to go up to the white board and write what they found. Next week we will finish our surprise for the blog and have some fun activities.

Fourth Grade:

This week we finished reading the Brixton Brothers book. The students got to work on their secret project too. We didn’t get to meet on Tuesday because of the awesome field trip that they got to attend at the Porter County Expo Center. I heard they had so much fun going to each booth and hearing about all the awesome things.

Next week we will play an exciting Brixton Brothers Jeopardy Game. I think the students will love the game and playing on teams. The Girls will be out on Monday because they will be attending their track meet. Tuesday will be our last day for Language Arts and I have some fun planned.

Math:

Kindergarten:

This week we continued to work on some cool games on Sum Dog. We tried some new games and they loved working together. Every student got to play street racer and solve math problems to make their car race faster. They had so much fun working together and watching each other.

Remember if your child wants to work at home on the site I sent home the letter with their passwords and if you need me to email you the information because you lost or misplaced it feel free to send me an email. Our school code is liberty-elementary-school because that is the school in our district that has the main account.

We will use this site to learn some more math facts and skills as we cover new topics. The students can play as much as you want them too. They can also change their character to look differently than the program starts them with (face, clothes, hair, and etc.) The students earn coins and can buy cool things for their character. This is an exciting way for students to practice math and language arts while having fun.

First Grade:

This week was all about working on math facts and learning new ones. We decided to play Sumdog.com on the electronic whiteboard to work on our skills. I continued to add some multiplication and division to challenge her. I think the game we enjoyed the most this week is Dance which is very cool and fun. Next week we will continue to have fun and work on our math facts. I am sad because it will be our last week.

Second Grade:

This week we continued with Sumdog.com on the IPads. They loved getting to compete and see how each other is doing on all the games. We also worked on the secret project for next week’s secret blog. We will be posting it in the middle of the week once all the classes complete their work.

Third Grade:

This week we checked out the laptops one day and the IPads the other. The students were super excited to see the laptops because they could finally go in and change their avatars. They have been working really hard at school and at home to move up levels and earn coins so they can give gifts to their classmates.

It is really great to see them interact and share all the great things they are learning on the site. They also had to complete their work on their secret project for next week. Next week we will continue working on the IPads and working on our math facts. I look forward to seeing what new and interesting stuff they have discovered on Sumdog.com.

Fourth Grade:

This week the fourth graders got to work in small groups to complete their secret projects. I allowed them to design and create their own ideas on this so I am looking forward to see what they have created. I will be posting their projects next week on the secret blog. I will let you know when it is ready.

Once they were done they got to use the IPads on both days to work on Sumdog.com. They love getting to find all the cool stuff they can do on the website. Next week the boys will be out on Wednesday for their track meet, and we will continue working on math facts on the IPads and Sum Dog.