Nonfiction Text and 3D Printing!

We have been reviewing nonfiction text features and reading lots of nonfiction books in class. To learn from one of the best nonfiction writers, we studied the books that author Sandra Markle writes.  Our favorites are her series of books- "What if you had animal...."

While reading these books, the kids took notes on their favorite animal's hair, teeth, and feet.  Then, they used that information to make a new hybrid animal with all of their favorite animal parts.  They had to create their animal and give it a new name.  They also had to present their new animal to the class.

The class voted on their favorite animal and we printed that animal out on the 3D printer!  Everyone did so great creating their animals and presenting!

Our class winner was Madison M.!  Her new animal is called the A.B.C. (Arctic Bengal Cheetah)

This was super fun!

Fiesta!

We had a great Fiesta day learning about Cinco de Mayo!

We celebrated with a lot of great food!

We had a cake walk...everyone won a cupcake to eat!

We also made some beautiful flowers!

It was a great day!

Author Study: Cynthia Rylant

We have been studying the amazing author, Cynthia Rylant.  We learned about where she grew up and what inspires her stories.  We read and discussed many of her stories in class.  

Here are a few of our favorite books that we read during our author study unit!  Ask your child about these amazing stories!

If you would like to learn more about this author and some of her other books, you can take a look at her website by clicking the link below!

Cynthia Rylant Website 

One of the fun activities that we did during out unit was to read a few of her series books. (Henry and Mudge, Poppleton)  After reading Poppleton, we made some inferences about how he was feeling in the story and listed the clues from the story that helped us to understand how he was feeling.  We created these Poppleton characters to display our inferences!

Prefixes and Suffixes

This week we are learning about prefixes and next week we will tackle suffixes. Check out these videos for a quick review!





Here's a chart with a few common prefixes and suffixes that we are talking about and using in class.

3D Printer!

I have been reading aloud a few different books to the class this year.  We were all interested in the books with the same theme: Survival.
We read Earthquake Terror first and we LOVED this book!  It was so exciting!  Then we began the Stranded Trilogy.  In all of these books kids were stranded on their own and had to figure out how to survive.

After reading, the students created their own survival tool that could have been used to help the characters in the book.  They each designed the tool, presented it to the class and explained how it worked and why it would be important to the characters in the stories.  The class then voted on their favorite survival tool.

The favorite tool was the Telaporter 3000 created by Wil!  

Mr. Wagner came to visit the class and he brought his 3D printer and showed the students how it worked.  The class helped Mr. Wagner recreate Wil's design on the computer using 3D shapes. We were able to print out the Telporter 3000 right there in class!  It turned out great!  It was an exciting day!

We used Tinkercad to create the 3D project. This is a free site that anyone can use.  You can login in and create and save anything you want!  (If you login with my class account, it will save to my group and maybe we can print out some more things when the 3D printer comes back to our school!)
https://www.tinkercad.com/

Login: wagnerswildcats1
Password: wildcats1

Here are some other resources for creating 3D objects to print:

Makerbot Printshop app- 

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/makerbot-printshop/id884304128?mt=8

Autodesk 123D Design for Education-

This app works a lot like Tinkercad does but it is for the iPad

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/123d-design-for-education/id901484714?mt=8

If you are interested in reading other books about survival...here are some more great books to read!

Read Across America Day

We had a great day of reading today for Read Across America!  We even had some special visitors!

Our guest reader Ms. Sutherland came to read an Olivia book to us!  She was an amazing guest reader!

We even had a visit from the Cat in the Hat!

It was a great day!!

Author Visit!

We were so lucky this week to have the amazing author and illustrator Emma Virjan visit our school! We had so much fun learning about how she makes her stories and pictures.  She even read aloud one of her books for us!  What a great day!

She even showed us how to draw the pig in a wig!

These are the books that she has out right now!

Click the link below to check out the author's website to learn more about her books and to see some short videos about each book!

Emma Virjan

Houston Symphony Field Trip!

We had a great day at the Houston Symphony!  We learned so much about orchestra instruments and music.  The kids looked great in their fancy clothes!

100 Random Acts of Kindness!

Thank you so much to everyone who participated in our 100 Random Acts Of Kindness project for the 100th day of school!

This week we were also able to begin using our Legos that were purchased for us with a LEAF grant!  We now have a Lego Storystarters kit!  The students build settings and characters with the Legos and use that to write a story.  There is also an excellent app that goes with this where they turn their Lego creation into a comic book story!  We will be learning that soon.