Winter place value trees

This morning students worked on creating winter trees. Each tree represents a different place value: ones, tens or hundreds. The students looked at pictures of winter trees and then used wax, crayons, chalk and white trees to bring them to life:

Brainstorming about what winter trees look like

Art done with wax, crayons, chalk and white paint

We contiued with our math rotations and spent the afternoon talking about how to make our story beginnings really exciting. Students were given the writing prompt:

You are walking to school and you see a snowman waving at you.

How would you start this story?

Building increasing patterns

Using Read and Write Gold

Students had the opportunity to use the computer program Read and Write Gold today. It is a fantastic program that allows students to select unknown words which are read to them by the computer. This is just one of the many features. In January, students will start using it consistently to research arctic animals (which we started on today!

We also spent time today talking about how to make our story beginnings more exciting for our readers. We talked about three ways to start a story: using a sound effect, describing an action or using dialogue.