Slippery!

Wow-it was slippery this morning! I almost hit Mrs. Bolyard's car in the parking lot and slipped a few times trying to get in to school! I hope your drive and trek this morning was safe!
We completed our M4T, Ohio Dailies and i-time and then had a pretty serious discussion during morning meeting. Tomorrow, we are going to practice a safety drill where instead of hiding in the classroom, we will practice a rapid evacuation. I stressed that this is a serious drill, just like fire and tornado, however, they shouldn't be scared. It's highly unlikely that we'll ever have a fire but we practice so we know what to do just in case. The same thing applies to this. We'll be evacuating and for tomorrow, meeting on school grounds, however, we discussed that for a true rapid evacuation, they'd continue toward Summit apartments or the woods, from our exit. I hope they shared our conversation with you and will tell you more after tomorrow's practice. We also played, "Just like me!" to help Declan and Alexis find others that may have similar interests as them. After saying the pledge and checking in our SMART goals for the day, we got started with Math Workshop. We began with a gallery walk looking at how we solved our fraction word problems from yesterday and the homework question from last night. (By the way, only 10 of our 27 students answered the one question they were given last night...) Then, we modeled adding fractions and then moved on to adding fractions with a sum of more than one whole, which transitioned our discussion into improper fractions and mixed numbers. We practiced converting from improper to mixed number and played a little game matching fractions with their compositions and ended math with a little "I have..., who has?" We had music (yay recorders!), lunch and indoor recess and then a few kiddos from Mrs. Kalb's class came over and performed a Reader's Theater of The Water Princess to raise awareness for the lack of clean water in Africa. In A Night Divided, we learned about record players and records because Gerta and Fritz were listening to the Beatles, a banned album in East Berlin, and very few new what these looked like. We do a lot of discussion with this book so we aren't getting very far. Then, we read independently and visited the library and in Reader's Workshop, we continued to find examples of text structures in informational text. Afterwards, we spent the rest of our afternoon in the media center learning about research with Mrs. Dornburgh. We had a few minutes while waiting for the bell, at the end of the day, and shared our highs and lows of the day.