We Recycle!

Our school is recycling, and 4A is in charge of recycling ink cartridges. Most people throw away their ink cartridges.  Ink cartridges are very bad for the environment. When the ink get in the soil, it could hurt the plants surrounding it. It is toxic to animals, too. Also, the plastic on the the cartridges takes a LONG time to decompose.

We have planned four steps for our work.
1. Advertise
2. Collect
3. Package
4. Ship

We will send the ink cartridges we get to a company that recycles them. We are already making many signs and placing them by the office and the cafeteria. We hope we get a lot of cartridges, but what matter is to keep our Earth clean.


Do you recycle ink cartridges?

DC University

Friday has become a very fun day for us at school because every Friday we have DCU which stands for DC University! It is a college-like experience wehre you get to switch classes and experience and learn different things with different teachers!

Every class that we have includes the 4 C's of ours school which are communication, collaboration, creativity, and critical thinking. My favorite classes are Art and Design and Dance. I love Art and Design because it lets you experiment with the different types of art forms and techniques you never knew about. And with Dance you get to travel around the world discovering all different types of dances that come from different countries. You get a chance to really know your hidden talents and find out what you're really good at. We have shared ideas and thoughts with each other and are creating unique products to share with everybody! We really enjoy DC University!

 

 

 

We Love Hero's Guide!

Right now our read-aloud is The Hero’s Guide to Saving Your Kingdom. We are on page 278. It is a story about four princes and their imperfect lives that make them go on a journey for a reason. Fredrick wants to find Ella, Gustav and Liam want to be heroes, and Duncan just goes because Snow White said so. They end up meeting each other and become a team, along with some arguing and fights.   three other princes to go home and says that he would be the hero himself. Although that happened, there has to be more adventure to come. We recommend this book to anyone who loves adventure, action, and fairytales because this book has many surprises and exciting fun.

 

 

We Love LOVE THAT DOG!

This week we read LOVE THAT DOG by Sharon Creech. This book is about a boy who hates poetry. But his teacher, Mrs. Stretchberry, starts reading poems to the class, and Jack sends a letter to a poet, and things change. This book is full of many poems by many poets. Our class favorite was ""Love That Dog".  

Have you ever NOT liked poetry?

Have you read this book?

A Question Mark Skype: Because the Place Is a Mystery!

Yesterday, our class had a mystery Skype call. They don't know where we are, and we don't know where they are. (But our teachers know!)

 

 

When we do a mystery Skype call, each class exchanges clues about their state. And you keep on doing the same process until someone figures out where the other class is. The teacher's name was Mrs. Brunelle. When we exchanged clues we said things like state symbols. We were looking up the questions on the Web and in atlases.

Here were some of their clues:

• Our state flower is the wood violet.
• It is impossible to have a hurricane in our state.
• People come to visit the Dells in our state.
• We are surrounded by bluffs.

Can you guess where they were? (Read the answer below.)

Here were some of the clues we shared:

• Our state tree is the pecan tree.
• Our state was once its own country.
• The monarch is our state insect.
• Our major agriculture is cattle, sheep, grapefruit, and cotton.

We kept guessing and guessing until we got it!

They live in Wisconsin!

After more sharing and talking, we talked about what books we liked. One of the books that came up was THE ONE AND ONLY IVAN. We had stuch a great time learning about each other's states. And we hope we can do it again!

Our Latest WOW Moment

On Thursday, our class had a wonderful WOW moment.

We were working on our group projects, and we checked our Twitter feed.

We received a tweet from a first grade class in Ohio:

We were surprised and happy to get this tweet because we really love CREEPY CARROTS! It's a book by Aaron Reynolds and it's illustrated by Peter Brown.

 

 

We replied to their tweet immediately after we wrote the tweet together.

 

But we needed two tweets to reply.

 

Before we could get THEIR reply, we got this tweet:

 

 

 

Yes! The illustrator Peter Brown replied to our tweets! We were SO excited and ELATED (this is one of our vocabulary words).
 

We love meeting authors, and we love books so this moment was very special to us.
 

We thank our first grade friends in Ohio! We look forward to sharing more good books with them!
 

Also, we recommend that you read this book IMMEDIATELY! But watch out for those creepy carrots!

 

 

World Read Aloud Day 2013: Skype Call #1

Today we Skyped with the author Mina Javaherbin, the author who wrote the picture book GOAL. 

We Skyped with her at 9:00 a.m. because in her time it was 7:00 a.m. (because we're in different time zones).

She told everyone interesting things. In the book Goal, the setting is Africa but she never went to Africa before. When she was writing the book, she already had an idea, but not a setting. One night, the perfect setting just came. There is a part in the book where bullies try to steal an old ball from the kids in the story.  She said that it was hard to think of a trick at that part, but finally she got the perfect one. Here is a picture we drew about the story. 

A couple of students asked her questions and gave her compliments about her book. This book was one of the Texas Bluebonnet Nominees for 2011-2012, and we had all read the book and enjoyed it very much. . She also said that writers often think about this: “On one hand we have happiness and hope; on the other hand, we have sadness and despair.” 

She was very kind to us, and we learned so much about writing and reading.

At the end, her kids said bye to us. They were on their way to school. We are very lucky to have Skype visits, and we hope to Skype again with another author.

4A Valentine's Day!

Today our class celebrated Valentine’s Day by separating our tables and creating our own "Valentown"!  Each set of tables or neighborhoods got to create their own name for their neighborhood.  Then each house in the neighborhood got to select an address and some people even wrote their addresses and neighborhood names on a sheet of paper to let everyone know! 

One of the neighorhoods is "Booklandia Lane".

One of the activities we did was to send a valentine to teachers in our building.  Each neighborhood got to decide on two teachers or staff.  We sent one to our custodian, our nurse, our librarian, our principal, our music teacher and we even sent one for the library.

Then we read a book called I Haiku You written by BetsySnyder.  It is a poetry book that isfilled with a type of poetry called a Haiku. A haiku is a piece that is three lines long. The first line is five syllables long. The second is seven syllables long, and the third is the same as the first.  We loved the book and then we got to create our own Haiku for each neighborhood!  The Haikus were Valentine-themed and were great!

Here's two of them:

 

 

We even used the 4 C’s of ourschool: communication, collaboration, creativity, and critical thinking! It was a great experience for our class, and we had fun too!

 Did you write any poetry on Valentine's Day?

From Mrs. Alaniz:
I had to share this awesome Yoda valentine I received from one of my students. Hope everyone had a great Valentine's Day! (Also, the idea for Valentown is not my own! It came from a wonderful teacher somewhere who shared it and I adapted it!)
 

Author Visit TODAY!

 

 

Today we had an author visit form C.Alexander London. He wrote a great book that our class read. It's called AN ACCIDENTAL ADVENTURE: WE ARE NOT EATEN BY YAKS.

He was very funny and we loved his book so much that we made him gifts. We had a great time with him and if you are looking for a good book, he is an author we would recommend!

One of the characters on p. 65 of THE ACCIDENTAL ADVENTURE  has a large collection of duck ties. Two of our classmates made duck ties for everyone. We wore them to the event! Even Mrs. Alaniz!

Tibet is a setting in the story.

There is a yeti in the book. Here's the yeti we made for the visit. We like his tie.

 

Here's what some of our classmates said about the visit:

"I thought it was pretty awesome to have an author read a chapter to us!"

"He was funny, and he seemed very honest."

"When it was over, I was inspired to become a writer."
"This was the best author visit we've ever had."

"We got to meet him in PERSON. No Skype or anything."

We had a fun visit with Mr. London!

Have you ever read his books?

Author Visit Excitement!

Our class is very excited because author C. Alexander London is coming to our school! He sounds very nice and funny (according to how funny his book trailer is starring him) and 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade can't wait for his arrival. In case you didn't know, C. Alexander London is the author of the bestselling series, An Accidental Adventure. It is about Oliver and Celia Navel.These twins love TV but hate exploring. Mr. London also spends his time writing Dog Tags, a series about military dogs.We are so excited that we are making things for him like duck ties that we will wear when he comes to our school, and even this blog post is something in honor of him. Our class is having a read-aloud and the book that we are reading is....An Accidental Adventure Book One: We Are Not Eaten By Yaks! We are almost finished,  and we are loving the book! Oliver and Celia are very funny!

We have been drawing pictures about events in the book.

This drawing is based on one of the descriptions in the book.

One of the chapters in ACCIDENTAL ADVENTURE is called "WE'VE GOT TO TRUST THE YAK".

 

 

Have you read this book? Do you know anything about yaks? 

Our class is very happy because two amazing books won the Caldecott and Newbery awards. One of the books was This is Not my Hat by Jon Klassen. It is about a little fish who steals a hat and thinks he can get away with it, But what he doesn't know is that there will be consequences. We are very happy about that AND we chose it for OUR Mock Caldecott winner! The Newbery winner was our class's favorite book: THE ONE AND ONLY IVAN!! It's written  by Katherine Applegate, an amazing author. It is about a REAL silverback gorilla named Ivan. If you look at our previous posts you will see that we have mentioned this book before because our class loves it so much! Whenever we heard the news we were extremely excited that it won. Our teacher went to the award ceremony, so we were one of the first classes to find out. To celebrate our class is going to enjoy Yogurt Raisins  (Ivan's favorite snack)!  Here are some photos:

Here is a picture of Katherine Applegate! She skyped with Mrs. Alaniz's class last year.

The book The One and Only Ivan and Ivan, our class mascot!

Ivan's favorite snack, Yogurt Raisins!

Reading Nonfiction

photo from scantours.com

Today we visited the Wonderopolis page.  The topic was Scandinavia. When were reading the Wonderopolis page we made a picture in our mind. We reread it and used context clues.  Scandinavia is made up of these countries: Denmark, Norway and Sweden. We also watched a video on Wonderopolis. Even though the video didn't have any words it still taught us about Scandinavia. We noticed that in the video it showed us the landscape in Scandinavia and what the weather is like there. Some parts can be cold, but you can also find "warm coastlines".

Scandinavia  is a very pretty place.

When we were reading the Wonderopolis article, we were were thinking about our thinking. That's called METACOGNITION. We wrote down unknown words, we wrote our thoughts, and our questions, too.

We learned the word fjord.

What do you know about Scandinavia?