Earh Materials Unit

Last Friday we started our hands-on unit on Earth Materials. Each child got this notebook that we will be using throughout the unit.
Each child was given a Mock Rock to observe. We looked at its physical properties, we measured it, and then we took it apart!

Here is a picture of our mock rocks.

This is what it looked like once we broke it apart. The boys and girls had to decide what part of the rock was minerals.

Then, we put the powder material in a cylinder with water to see what happened. Bradley is shaking his up hard!

Then, they observed the cylinder and wrote down their observations. Today we will observe the cylinders again after it has sat all weekend.

Pray for my daddy!

I will not be at school on Tuesday and possible Wednesday because my sweet daddy is having surgery at St. Vincent's Hospital in Birmingham. He just found out he has another spot of cancer that has to be removed. This is his fourth time in a little over a year to battle this aggressive disease! Please keep him and my family in your prayers as we go at it AGAIN!!! UGH!!!!

Science: Earth Materials

The boys and girls took learning into their own hands and worked in groups to study about rocks and minerals.
They read together and stopped often to discuss what they were learning.

This unit has introduced a lot of new vocabulary words. They sounded like a little bunch of geologists talking to each other. It was way too cute!!!

There is more to come on our unit on Earth Materials. We will be doing lots of hands-on experiments!

Hundred Charts

To help the children get a visual picture, we colored in our multiplication facts on hundred charts. This helped them see that multiplication is just skip counting. We spent several days doing this and looking at for patterns. We did our 2's through 12's.

After we finished coloring, we went back and wrote multiplication sentences for our charts.

Arranging Chairs = Multiplication Arrays

Problem: This week I asked the boys and girls to imagine helping me set up chairs for our class play in the theater. I explained to them that I had 12 chairs. The trick was that I had to put them in rows of equal number. They were to come up with all the different arrangements possible even they seemed somewhat silly. Here is what we came up with......

We did this same problem with different numbers of chairs. For example, 16, 18, 24 and 36 chairs. They learned about arrays and did not even realize it!

National Championship Game: Roll Tide Roll!

My whole family gathered at my sister's house on Thursday night for food and football! This is my sister, Michelle, and my brother, Shawn! Both of them graduated from the University of Alabama!
Here they are with my mom and my brother-in-law, Stephen. My dad and I are there, too, but somehow we did not get in any of the pictures.

Here are the kiddos playing Rock Band before game time!

They were getting pumped up for the big game! ROLL TIDE!!!

Stephen, my brother-in-law, cooked ribs and chicken wings for us to eat!

Mr. David and my nephew, Patrick are quite serious!

My sweet niece, Penny, eating her pizza! She is a mess!

Smitty and his cousin, Sam

Callie, my niece, and Patton eating pizza and chicken wings!

It was a fun evening! We are so glad school was cancelled for Friday because it was a late night for us all!! ROLL TIDE!!!!

The Scene at JHES Thursday AFTERNOON!

Wow! It was a little chaotic dismissing 500 children on Thursday at 11:30. We got the news at 10:30 and were encouraged to feed every child lunch! It was quite interesting inside our lunchroom! However, the children were so excited!!!

Mrs. Olinger had a fight with her umbrella on her way out to the street to call car numbers! It was hilarious!

It was so pretty outside! I am so glad the children got to go home and enjoy it with their families!

Meet Jamey Tessitore

On December 29, our very own Whitley Johnson was adopted ! Not only was she adopted, she changed her name! Her new mother's name is Bethaney Nicole Tessitore, so she wanted to be called Jamey Nicole Tessitore!
Jamey's mother came and read a book about adoption to the boys and girls and explained why Whitley changed her name to Jamey. It was all very sweet!!!
What a blessing! I am so happy for them!

It is time for MULTIPLICATION!

This week we discussed multiplication and how it works! First, I read them this book!
Then as a class, we made of list of items that come in groups of 2. For example, a pair of socks, eyes, arms, legs, hands, wheels on a bicycle, 2 Turltle Doves, etc.

Next, I divided the kiddos into small groups to help figure out what comes in groups of 3, 4, 5,...12!

It was a lot harder than they thought it would be!

I gave them about 20 minutes to come up with their lists.

After awhile, I let them cheat a little bit by googling their group on the internet.

After time was up, we gathered back together and came up with this.....

Our lists were finally complete!

The boys and girls practiced writing their own multiplication problems by using these lists. They had to show me their multiplication sentence and their addition sentence to solve the problem.

For example, I had 3 chairs. Each chair has 4 legs. There are 12 legs in all.

3 x 4 = 12 4 + 4 + 4 = 12

Mrs. Coon's Christmas Fun

We had a wonderful Christmas break by spending lots of time with family. David and I are very fortunate to have both of our parents here in Decatur with us. The boys were thrilled to see their cousin, Buddy the dog, from New York. They have really missed him.
Here are my parents with all of their grandchildren on Christmas Eve.

We gave Snuggies to the girls on David's side of the family. Here is David's mother with her pretty pink Snuggie.

Here is Aunt Jill snuggling in her new Snuggie.

Uncle Murray and Aunt Jill bought the boys hats from Philadelphia.

They also got them a copy of The Constitution and The Declaration of Independence.

This is Patton with his cousin Penny. She drew his name this year in our gift exchange.

Here is Smitty with his cousin Patrick. Patrick drew his name in our gift exchange.

My sweet daddy got lots of new clothes! All of his old clothes are way too big since his surgery. Now he said he can't gain any weight. He has too many new clothes to wear!

Santa Claus came to our house! This is what he brought for both of them to share!

This is what Santa brought Smitty on Christmas morning.

Here is what Patton got from Santa!

This was Patton's response when he saw what Santa brought him.

The only thing Smitty cared about was his IPOD Touch!

On Christmas morning, we headed over to my parents' house to eat a yummy breakfast together!

I hope each and everyone had a wonderful Christmas as well!