November Assemblies and Reading Fun

We enjoyed having our principal, Mrs. DeGaetano, as a guest reader this week!  She was participating in the Principal Reading Challenge, and spent the entire day reading to classes.  Our read aloud choice for her was My Teacher is a Monster.

This week we also talked more about making text-to-text connections.  After reading these two stories, Miss Conley and the class created a Venn Diagram to compare and contrast the books.  

Our read aloud chart continues to grow!

On Wednesday, we celebrated Veterans Day with a flag raising ceremony in the front of the school.

The local boy scout troop was in charge of lowering/raising the flags.  

You could have heard a pin drop as our students stood watching this important ceremony!

The new flag went up.

It was a beautiful morning!

Next, we had the Veterans Day Assembly in the gym.

We were lucky to have many veterans as our honored guests.   Some even came to the before-school breakfast.  The fourth grade students sang many beautiful patriotic songs, and several students shared their poems about these brave men and women who have served our country.  

On Friday, we went down to the gym for another special event.

We waited patiently as the P.E. teachers got ready.

The anticipation grew...

Finally it was time to see a possible world record take place at McDole.  

In honor of McDole's 5th year of participation in the WSSA World Record Cup Stacking Day, the P.E. teachers and students, built a giant wall of cups during P.E. classes. 

It took steady hands and teamwork to stack over 300 cups!

The wall was almost complete...

One lucky student had the honor of pulling a string that was attached to 1 cup at the bottom, bringing the whole wall down.  We had to be as quiet as possible, so he could hear all of the cups falling, and know that the task was accomplished.

Once they fell, we all celebrated with applause!

It worked!

And our Friday ended in celebration!

Using our Schema and Making Connections

We have been learning a lot about schema! Miss Conley explained to the class that a lint roller is like our brain.  It sticks to anything that it comes in contact with.  These ideas roll together in our brain, and are called our schema. Each person has different experiences, and thoughts which make their schema unique, and can be used to understand what they are reading.  

We talked about elephants one day and learned all about how schema can help our reading and change our understanding.

These are some examples of our schema on elephants before we read the new book.  

This is some of our new learning about elephants after reading.  

This is one idea that changed our knowledge of elephants after reading. We realized that elephants aren't just found in the wild in Africa.  They also live in Asia!

We had a lot of schema on the topic of fireflies!  Everyone in the class has tried to catch lightning bugs in the summer.  

We even used some reading strategies when reading this big book.  Here, one of our friends sees a little word in the big word!  

We are also using our schema as we make connections to the stories we read.  We link our fingers together to show when we can relate to the meaningful parts of stories.  

Sometimes our text-to-self connections are when we can relate to the character in the story.  Other times, we can relate to the main idea of the story.  

These are a few of the stories we've been reading and connecting with.  We have also learned to make text-to-text connections.  Lost Cat and Charlie Anderson  had a lot of common elements.  

The Girl With A Cape Assembly was fantastic!

We learned so much.  Every one of us can be a superhero and use our powers for good!

The author did a fun activity inviting some of our first grade friends to demonstrate kind actions/words.

We learned how one positive action/word can touch so many others!

Like passing a ball, we can pass on kindness to others.

Kindness can be contagious!  We made a lot of connections to this story.  We thought of all the ways we could be kind to others.

Check out more on her website, and look for our bulletin board showcasing the Room 224 Superheroes!  

On Friday we got together with Miss Reuter's class to read The Littlest Pumpkin.

We made connections to the story.  Each of us remembered a time when we felt disappointed, just like the littlest pumpkin did when he wasn't chosen to be carved.   

We each wrote about our connection.

We also created our own pumpkin.  

Each pumpkin is as unique as we are.  

Check out our connections and our pumpkins on the bulletin board at our upcoming parent/teacher conferences this week!