A few activities my students participated in before our holiday break.

Here are the Christmas trees students made using ice cream cones, white icing ( I forgot the green dye at home), marshmallows, m&ms, and one snowman peep. They worked really hard on their christmas trees, and they came out great.

A Christmas Art activity students created using pre-cut card stock.





This is a picture of my second class of 4th graders performing a reading of "Bob the Goofy Reindeer for the PreK classes at our school.

And here they are performing for a Kindergarten class.

My cheerleaders performing at our 1st annual Winter Recital. They rocked the end of the recital!

The cheerleaders waiting for their turn at the recital. The cafeteria was packed with parents, friends, staff, teachers and more. I think we had about 1200 people in attendance at the start of the recital.

A Christmas gift I received from a student. The cookies were so yummy!

A penpal letter received from our pen pals in New York. It was like Christmas opening our letters. They were so excited to read their letters and learn more about their faraway friends.

So of course here you can see, we got to work right away writing our penpals back. They went into the mail the next day.

Finally, here's a picture of my twin boys with Santa at their breakfast/singalong on Friday.

Hope everyone has a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

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Mrs. Shepherd

We were so excited to receive our pen-pal letters today from our pen pals in New York City. It was like Christmas in our classroom. We loved all the artwork from our pen pals and their letters sharing a little about their life and school. Tomorrow we will begin working on our letters back to them.

Friday we participated in another Mystery Skype with a 5th grade class in Michigan. We learned a lot about their state such as water is not in short supply, the cherry festival is held there, and they are located in the northern part of the United States.

We are looking forward to two more Mystery Skypes that we are signed up for on Wednesday am and pm.

We are learning a lot about the states this year through Mystery Skypes and the postcard exchange.

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Mrs. Shepherd

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Mrs. Shepherd

This week our focus in Reading is on identifying and explaining the difference between folktales, including a myth and a legend.

Today after our long morning of Interval testing, ( Intervals= cumulative assessment of the nine weeks) we began our discovery of myths.

I began the lesson with having students think about movies or books that contained magic, and elicited responses, and then I had students think again about what movies or books that contain magic and which also explain how the world or nature has come to be. I didn't receive many responses from this prompt, which was fine because this led me into my mini-lesson with introducing a short myth of how leaves were created. I read the short myth and asked students how this story was different from other stories we have read. Students talked to one another and we discussed the various differences. Then I passed out the story Arachne's Web to students. We read the story together stopping and discussing the following points: the god or goddesses, the problem to overcome, the journey taken, and the resolution to the problem. Next, students broke out into groups some students worked on questions from the myth Arachne's Web, others used the Mee Genius app on the iPads to listen to the myth Persephone, and a few others logged into KidBlog and clicked on a post I created with several other myths to read. Finally, we came back together to discuss our discoveries and students explained orally the characteristics of a myth.

We also began working on our Louisiana brochures for our in class Social Studies project and to send to our penpals in New York.

We are using Pages on the iPad and Microsoft word (brochure template) to showcase our state.

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Mrs. Shepherd