The First 3 Days

The first 3 days have come and gone. Oh, how wonderful they were. 

We started our year on the right foot by all entering the building together as a class...or family.

We entered the room, greeted each other warmly and read a wonderful book. 

Then the students were dying to find their new seats and tablemates. Well, it would have been fine to have them go find their name tags and sit down. However, it is so much more fun to give them each a puzzle piece and find the pieces that they belong with. It was a great team-building experience and we had a lot of fun!

The students also participated in a STEM/creativity project. They were each given 3-4 pipe cleaners and a few sheets of aluminum foil and given the direction to... create! 

They worked thoughtfully on them for a great deal of time. It was fun to see how their creative brains work, an excellent way to get to know them. The projects will be used for a future blog post. 

We also made some time for good amount of reading!

Room 200 Fun Fact - We write down the title of every read aloud experience we have as a class. In the first 3 days, we heard 7 amazing books!

It was nice to hear from a guest reader too!

We also started working collaboratively on our Declaration of Awesomeness. More to come on that very soon!

Our first 3 days were so packed with fun and learning that it is almost too much to list! 

However, Here is a quick final rundown of our first moments together:

We played some new math games. 

We wrote on our Graffiti Wall about our 1st day book.

We explored the room.

We made our room feel like home. 

Enjoy this glimpse into our first 3 days:

2015-2016 from LBright on Vimeo.

Meet Mrs. Bright - Welcome to Room 200!

It is almost time!!!!

The summer just flew by and now it is time to get back into the school mode. I am really looking forward to starting my journey at Blackberry Creek Elementary School. 

Right now, Room 200 is very lonely and empty. I am excited for 26 students to fill it with love, laughter and learning. 

I can't wait to meet all of you in just a few short days. Until then, let me tell you a bit about myself:

(Pictured above: Bruce, Ron, Laura, Dolly and Cooper)

My name is Laura Bright and I live in Sycamore, Illinois. We have a big old house that we have been fixing up and loving for the last 4 years. I live there with my husband Ron, my 3 dogs and 2 cats. Sometimes our house feels like a zoo!

I really enjoy school and it is my passion but I have some other fun interests as well. I am a fitness nut! I love running, biking, hiking and weight training. It is a fun way to meet new people and try new things. In fact, I will be competing in the Aurora Duathlon just after school starts! I am very excited to try a new type of event!

This will be my 12th year as a teacher in the Kaneland School District. I have spent the last 10 years at McDole with most of them being in 1st grade. I really enjoy teaching the primary grades and I believe it is absolutely my calling. 

You will soon find that I am very passionate about my job. I jump out of bed each school day, excited to join my class in another day of learning. I am most passionate about creativity, wonder and tech infusion to help enhance our learning day. With this passion, I also like to spread the word to other teachers by presenting at many conferences and leading full day workshops. I hope to inspire not only my amazing students but other teachers as well. 

Goals for the Year:
This year, our class will focus our successful year around the 4C's. 
We will become collaborative learners, critical thinkers, excellent communicators and creative explorers. 
With these skills mastered, there is no limit to what we will be able to achieve. 

In addition, as for my personal goals for the year, I want my students to feel loved and trusted. I want them to know that I think about them and do everything I can to personalize their education. I want them to feel that they have ownership in our classroom and are comfortable sharing their learning with us. 


Homework:
Parents, Please take a few minutes to fill out the attached survey so that I can get to know and understand your child.  

Click here for Parent Survey

Also, feel free to send in a framed photograph of your family or other photograph with special meaning to your child on the 1st day. We will display these photos in our room to help create a warm and comfortable atmosphere. 

Can't wait to see you all on Monday, August 17th!

Spending Time in Fairy Tale Land

The Land of Fairy Tales has moved into Room 222. As we study these classic stories, we have set a goal to become experts in this genre. Our room has immersed itself into truly understanding the story and the struggles of our characters. 

To do this, we have a S.T.E.A.M focus for our unit. S.T.E.A.M stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math.

For our Fairy Tale Fair, each student has chosen the project and fairy tale study of his/her choice. Through this process, Room 222 decided on 5 different Fairy Tales and Focuses. 

Some of our Room 222 classmates have chosen to study the art of theater by performing two classics, Jack and the Beanstalk and Cinderella. 

A few have chosen the art of design through the study of The Emperor's New Clothes. Our clothing makers are experimenting with weaving. 

The Culinary Arts will also be represented at our Fair through the study of The Little Red Hen. Two of our talented students are studying and experimenting with bread baking.

Last but not least, an ambitious group of engineers has chosen to try and trick the Big Bad Wolf by building a house that he (my blowdryer) cannot blow down. 

At our Fairy Tale Fair, you will not only be able to see two amazing performances, you will also be able to learn about the other projects from our experts and experiment with these techniques yourself!

Room 222 can't wait to see you at our Fairy Tale Fair. 

Check out this example of the amazing learning the student have been doing:

Fairy Tale Two from LBright on Vimeo.

Genius Hour 2015

Welcome to Genius Hour 2015!

I hope that you have heard your child mention Genius Hour because that is all they can talk about here at school. 

Genius Hour is an activity Room 222 will be exploring for the next few weeks to build our knowledge on topics that are interesting to us. 

Check out this short video explaining Genius Hour:

Here is what our journey through Genius Hour will look like:

These are our accomplishments and stages so far:

1. Get your ideas - Students started by writing down all of the topics they wanted to know more about. 

2. Then, after a day or two to think, each students decided on one topic to focus on for several weeks. 

Then we began drawing and writing about what we already knew. We also started our wonderings and questions. 

3. We are currently in the Research and Take Notes stage. We are gathering inspiration, instructions and ideas from sites that we are exploring. We learned how to use KidRex.org as our kid-friendly search engine.  Through this stage we also learned how to evaluate different websites and decide which are good for us and which we should pass by. 

Room 222 has been doing very well and is extremely motivated and excited about their projects. Our project list is very diverse this year. Here are our student chosen topics for 2015:

How to Build a Model Train
Make a Model Shark
Robotics/Circuit exploration
Make the Best Milkshake
Make Fudge
Learn to Bake
Create Potions
How to Make a Tornado
Make our Favorite Minecraft Characters with Legos 


Genius Hour in Room 222 has several expectations:
1. Proper use of Technology and Materials
2. Showcase Research and Note Taking Skills
3. Information must be Shared with our Audience

Here are our first reflections on Genius Hour:

Genius Hours from LBright on Vimeo.

Please stay tuned for more information!

Collaborative Ocean Inquiry Learning

Last week we dove into a new project, Ocean Creature Inquiry Groups.  Based on interest, the students have joined a group to research a specific ocean creature. This style of learning will help us through the research process by allowing us to gather and synthesize our information and discuss it as a group. 

Along with the research process, group collaboration is the big focus. We have discussed that scientist, teachers, police officers and most other professions must work together in groups. We watched a few videos of scientists working as teams and discussed how we could do the same. 

We started our inquiry process by writing down all of our thoughts about our research creature. 

Check out this video from our first session:

Inquiry projects from LBright on Vimeo.

Then the students began to code their thoughts. They were to locate questions, wonders, noticings and facts that they already knew. 

Once they built their schema, the students began to research. One of our goals is to gather information using many different types of media. We will focus on our favorite online resource Pebblego, Youtube videos and books about our creature. We are charting this new learning on our information poster. 

Remember, collaboration and teamwork is the underlying focus of this research unit. Check out this video for example of amazing teamwork and knowledge sharing:

Collaboration from LBright on Vimeo.

As we move forward, we will continue to gather information and then begin the process of synthesizing that information into the most important. From there we will write our research papers.

Thanks for checking in!

A Little Bit of Writing and a Little Bit of Science

Well, I blinked and March is over! I can't believe it went by so quickly. 
For Room 222, March was filled with some very exciting and new academic challenges. Our current writing unit is taking us to new genre of writing, Opinions and Arguments. 

Throughout this unit, Room 222 students will be forming an opinion, supporting this statement with valid reasons and learning how to disagree with another person's opinion in an academic way.

We start this process by deciding which piece in our collection is the best or "the blue ribbon winner". We relate this to a dog show. The judges must score the pieces and decide which deserves the award. 

Here you can see a student's work and scores while still in the deciding process. 

This student has chosen to give stars to the cards based on different categories. The one with the most stars won the award. 

This student has picked his favorite winning piece and has started his opinion writing form.

We hope to show you more of our opinion writing at next week's open house!

Recently, our science study switched from Space to Oceans. 

We are starting by learning of the four layers of the Ocean: Tide Pool, Open Ocean, Ocean Floor and the Abyss. 

Following our study of the Tide Pool, the students explored the other 3 layers using food coloring, water and vegetable oil to help show the 3 color differences in the ocean.

After combining all of the ingredients and giving it a good shake, you can see the 3 separate colors that indicate the layers. 

Once our bottles were clean and oil free, the students used Sharpies to label the layers. 

Then, as scientists, we wrote and drew about the experiment and our observations. 

We will continue our Ocean studies through the month of April in many different ways. We can't wait to show you!

Week in Review

Have you ever wondered why our moon looks different at different times of the month?

One night you could see a big and bold moon and other nights you could see just a sliver.

Room 222 learned about the phases of the moon and even made our own models. 

We needed 3 objects: the earth, moon and sun. We used balls from P.E. class for our earth and moon. We used flashlights for the sun. The students worked to find dark places to create their models. They found that if they flip over a table, they get just the right darkness needed for a good photograph. 

They used these photographs in their informational moon movies. Those will be posted later this week.

The students also started researching self-chosen topics this week. We used two of our favorite websites to find information on topics ranging from Babe Ruth to Tornados to Golden Retrievers. PebbleGo.com and WorldBookOnlineKids.com are our must-have sites for research. 

As the students researched, they took notes on their note-keeping sheet. It was very impressive to see how hard they worked this week and how seriously they took their research.

We will now use these notes to write an informational paper that we will publish and celebrate!

Last but certainly not least, we had a room full of guest readers this week! 

We LOVE a good story!

Thanks for checking in!