Merry Christmas

December is a crazy, wonderful, busy month, and our classroom was no different! Here are a few highlights from December:

December Highlights

• Hour of Code - We took part in the annual world-wide Hour of Code. The students used coding language to work their way through a series of games on code.org. They did such a great job and had a lot of fun! Many of them have been asking to do more coding, which is fantastic! Not only is coding a great computer skill to learn, but it is great for teaching reasoning, logic, precision, and reading!
• Christmas Program - The third graders did a beautiful job at this year's Christmas program! I am so proud of them all! There are lots of pictures in our showcase!
• Mystery Skype - We took part in our third Mystery Skype this month when we Skyped with a class in Summerville, South Carolina. Our class was so well behaved and were great role models for the other class (it was their first ever Mystery Skype!). In addition, our students were featured in a blog post on Discovery Education because of Mystery Skype, which is pretty cool! You can read the blog post here.
• Breakout - Another fun thing we did this month was a Narnia-themed breakout game! We finished reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe last week, so I made a game to review the vocabulary and main concepts of the book. The students had to follow the clues to unlock the final treat - Turkish Delight left by the White Witch! 
• STEM Challenges - For the three days before break, the students took part in a series of Christmas themed STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) challenges. They had to use basic materials to solve specific problems, just like an engineer does. The kids had a lot of fun and did some really great thinking, especially for being so close to Christmas!
• Letters to Santa - Each year, I like to have the students write letters to Santa. For one thing, it is always a way to motivate them to do their best work, and for another, it is good practice for writing letters and addressing envelopes. The students did a great job on their letters and I had so much fun reading them! We even walked down to the Post Office to mail them and took a trip across the street to see Santa's Workshop.

Living Museum

This month, I assigned the students their historic figures for our annual Living Museum. This year our theme is Saints! They will be doing all of the research, projects, and speeches in class, so they do not need to worry about getting any of that done at home (I won't say they CAN'T work on it though, because overachieving is always allowed!). The only thing that will need to be done at home is to prepare a costume. It doesn't need to be elaborate; it just needs to give the impression of their person. I am tentatively planning for the museum to be held on January 22. If that changes, I'll let you know.

​If you need ideas for costumes, let me know. Here are a few pictures from past years to help you get some ideas:

Housekeeping

• THANK YOU to the mystery Santa that purchased an amazing Snap Circuit set for our class. The students were so excited and can't wait to start using it!!
• The photo gallery on our showcase is up to date.
• School resumes on January 4, 2016. 
• There is no homework for the Christmas break.