Our New Class Photo

So have you seen our latest class picture? That's it above! Yes, we do look a little different than we usually do. These are our Avatars.

We have been using a new website called Bit Strips for Schools. Our first job was to create an Avatar. An Avatar is a picture or symbol to represent ourselves. Next we put our Avatar in a cartoon. We will be posting those cartoons on our Kidblogs, so check those out from time to time.

We are cartooning as part of our Being a Writer writer's workshop. The unit we are working on is called "Functional Writing." Functional writing includes recipes, writing directions, cartooning, and lots of other ways we use writing in every day life. We are having lots of fun!

Field Day

What a busy week we've had. Today was Field Day. It was cool, but dry, and the sun even broke through during part of the afternoon. Here are photos from some of my favorite events. We started out with the sack race.


We had a real test of strength with the Tug of War.


There was lots of action with the shoe toss, but watch out below, because you never know where they're going to land.


We ran some relays.


Partners raced with the Buddy Walkers, which requires lots of teamwork.


And you can't forget about the Water Balloon Toss.

Castles 2011

We had a very busy week with a field trip on Tuesday to the Des Moines Art Center, our castles were due on Wednesday, and we had Core Knowledge Night on Thursday. During the day on both Wednesday and Thursday, each member of our class presented their castle to the class. We interviewed them, and they told us about their castle, the materials they used, and who helped them.

We also did some more writing about our castles. This time we are writing a Castle Fairy Tale. We will post our completed fairy tales along with a picture of the castle on our Kidblogs. In the meantime, take a look at the Animoto above to see a video of all of our finished castles. We hope you like them.