Happy New Year!

I made it through my first day back! I'm pretty swollen, sore and tight but I did it! We had a good day~very chatty, but the first day back is always chatty. We started the day with "Snaps" of our winter break and shared them during our meeting. We shared a lot during our meeting, actually! I really enjoyed chatting and catching up. Next, we completed a 2017 Year In Review. In order to set goals and improve, we need to first know where we are. This review helped get our minds right on the basics of our 2017. We started a new book for Read Aloud, The Beaded Moccasins by Lynda Durrant. This is a historical fiction book about Mary Campbell who was taken captive by Native Americans in the 1700's. We are still being introduced to the characters, setting and time period so we haven't even gotten to her capture yet. In Reader's Workshop, we met up with our literature groups to make sure we were all caught up with our reading-which most of us were not... After lunch and indoor recess, obviously, in Math Workshop, we used what we knew of fractions to understand the markings on a ruler and then measured ourselves to the nearest quarter inch. We then made a line plot of how tall we all area and drew conclusions about our data. Next, we read a quote:

and discussed that we should measure our growth (academic, sports, etc.) on our past, not each other-just like we measure our height. We even hung up a paper and marked our heights that we can look at as a visual for remembering this. It's hard to not compare ourselves to each other, especially once you get old enough to understand, but we are going to try! We concluded our day reviewing our understanding of the mound builders.