It's Monday and I want to crawl back under the blankets...who is with me? It was a bitter cold weekend with about 15 inches of snowfall over here. That made for quite the insanity. This morning is slow going and I have a jumble of things to share. One thing I make it a point to do, is to use my materials in as many ways as possible. These are bulletin board calendar pieces that are all laminated and would normally sit in a crate until their month arrives and they get to shine! Not in my classroom! They are in this envelope that sits in a crate of dailies, things that need to be gone through daily until they are so ingrained in the memory that they can be sold or re purposed once again. They are just about reaching the end of their use with us, but for now I will share what we do. The envelope is dumped and my son must organize them in monthly order. I then added some index cards with construction paper scraps to make up the days of the week and those need to be put into order as well. It is busy work but it is hands on work with bright colors that keep him occupied. The crate of dailies hold items for each child, I will do a post on the dailies later on in the week!
How many of you own Children's Encyclopedia's or Big Book of Why's? We have so many of these on our shelves that are full of information perfect for reports and research, but I wanted more out of them! I recently began usin a fact or 2 each day and making a worksheet/coloring page with that fact. Once I have made something for that fact, I put a post-it on the fact and date that post-it with the date we used it in class. Eventually we have an entire encyclopedia with proof that we know it all or at least what we remember.
I've mentioned before that my son is on a robotics team, he absolutely loves it and enjoys anything hands on. He has wanted to build & design bridges since he was 3 and is a complete Anglophile that wants to go to college in London and live there. He is my little engineer and anythign we can do to nurture that in him, we do. We bought him the LEGO mindstorms Robot from the LEGO store, but these things are EXPENSIVE! He loves LEGOS and has plenty of the regular kind, but after joining the robotics team, he loves building and programming his own bots and he's learning so much by doing this. This past weekend he got a second kit to join his first and this boy is in bot heaven. We took him to Home Depot to get a case to keep all his bot parts in, so that it was more portable and sturdier than the boxes. Little did we know that we would need 2! Back to the team...so they were told that they needed a better name than the one they had, as they wanted shirts for their state competition. The kids were told to come prepared with team names to the next class...I want them to be the Domo Arigato's....my son thinks I am nuts...I played him the song....yeah, I think I confirmed to him that I am nuts.
Here is one of his bots that he has programmed to shoot a Nerf gun. It's still in it's testing phase, but once he finishes it up, I plan on uploading a video. I am so proud of this kid that it's not even funny. I love when the mind wins out over anything else and as cheezy as this sounds, he's got a great mind!
Remember to enjoy every minute my friends!
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