Five for Friday 2.7.14

I'm spent.... what a week! I haven't posted anything this week either, so I thought it would be a great opportunity to link up for the first time with Doodle Bugs Teaching for the weekly linky called Five for Friday!  

I'm not sure my week was as exciting as I originally planned it to be, however it was a full week of school, so after 5 snow/cold days I'm excited to say that I got a full week in with my kiddos.  Here are my 5 for the week...

1. This week in math we worked really hard on place value.  More specifically we focused on rounding numbers to the nearest ten and hundred.  As those of you who have been reading and following my blog know that our school is new to math expressions this year, so I'm trying very hard to keep track of just about everything that's going on.  We started the year with multiplication which is not usually what we do.  We are now at the point where we're working on place value, so I was quite nervous to teach it at this point in the year.  I have to say that I LOVE LOVE LOVE the way that they have kids work on rounding.  

We started by writing and drawing the number out that we needed to round. 

We then wrote and drew both hundreds or tens that it could be rounded to. 

Last we looked back at the first number we drew, and focused on the tens place in our proof drawing.  If it has 5 or more tens, we rounded up.  If it has less than 5 tens we rounded down. 

Students loved this strategy and it crossed over nicely when we took the pictures away and just looked at the place in the number that we needed to focus on. :) I was one happy lady!

Our school is a PLC (professional learning community).  We meet once a week as a team, and discuss the big three questions: 1-What do our students know? 2-What do our students need to learn? 3-What will we do if they aren't where they need to be.  We also have one early release a month to either meet as a team, a district team, or do some vertical teaming. This week our team was back together again after a co-worker has been gone on maternity leave.  We spent a lot of time planning our upcoming 'Pioneer Simulation' for the last quarter of school.  I will explain more as it gets closer, but in a nutshell students partake in a full on simulation getting fake pioneer identities, jobs, families, animals, etc. They then travel west on the Hacker Trail in hopes of making it to the valley in Oregon.  It makes me so excited for what's to come! Our kids have a blast with this simulation. 

Here's a sample family portrait from last year.  Th students keep this portrait on their desk as they are traveling in their wagon trains.

  

Although it's been freezing cold again this week, I've been driving a different way to school to see this beautiful image each morning...it's just been great for the soul and helps to start the morning off calm!

Don't worry.. I pulled over before I took the picture!

To keep up on our multiplication, we've been playing Yahtzee this week during indoor recess. It's been too cold to go outside, and I think we've had too much 'screen' time... so I've pulled out games and taught my kids how to play: boggle, Yahtzee, checkers and more!  They are loving every minute of it. I'm not going to lie, I also love it!

On a personal note.. I've left the water on in the bathroom now 2 times this week.  My husband is beyond shocked as to how real pregnancy brain is.  He even took a picture because I didn't believe that I did it....twice!!!????  I mean come on, it's running pretty hard, not just a trickle!! :)

T.G.I.F! Have a great weekend!