Happy New Year!

I was so happy to have all of my kiddos back today! I felt like I was missing some family over these past two weeks. AND we had a new member today~Declan, from Texas, has joined our classroom community! Of course we had an extended morning meeting so that everyone could share what they did while away. Some got new pets, new shoes, new electronics and one even got a new brother! Congrats Riley family! Once we finally got to Math Workshop, we took our pre-assessment over addition and subtraction of fractions so we can get started on learning about composing and decomposing fractions tomorrow. Today was B day so we had Art and then lunch and indoor recess. We are reading a new book for read aloud so we took time to check out the titles that are participating in March Book Madness (marchbookmadness.weebly.com). We'll pick at least one of the middle grade titles to read before the voting begins (we've already read 2 this year!) and I have checked out a lot of them from the public and our school library so they can borrow them to read independently too. Then, we decided to take some time to check out the books we have in our classroom library and instead of having tubs of books organized by author and genre on the shelves, students partnered up and filled a tub with books they are interested in reading and labeled it with their name. This generated a lot of interest in the books we have in our room and they enjoyed finding "new" books to read. In Writer's Workshop, we did some free-writing while some finished their pre-test and we finished up our day talking Science and what we can do to become better scientists.