More Surprise Readers

Again, we had another two great visitors to share some of their favorite books with us. Thank you for coming in!

Fantastic Friday

Finally, we ended our day with another surprise reader and special guest sibling reader, too! What a fun book for our ending to the day! Thanks for coming in!


Then we had a special presentation about bullying by one of our student's sister! What great information was shared with us and excellent presentation skills were demonstrated for us, too!




Then we started our next Models and Designs investigation... making go-carts! There was definite excitement in the air!


Due to selecting this as a reward out of our classroom's treasure box, a student played two songs on her instrument for us! Congratulations! You sounded great!


The day started out with another surprise reader! Thanks for sharing two of your holiday favorite books with us!

Another Suprise Reader!

We had another fun visitor to our classroom this afternoon! Thank you for sharing one of your favorite books with us!

Winter Concert

This year, our classroom has ALL students participating in the winter concert! Today's afternoon concert was truly wonderful and put me right into the holiday spirit! Congratulations, Room 223 performers! Good luck at tonight's concert! (By the way, don't they look quite spiffy?!)

What are we making?

We can't tell, but we used lots of glue!

Surprise Readers

We have had a few surprise readers come into our classroom to share a favorite book with our class! We have enjoyed each reader and their selection so much! Thank you, parents, for spending some time with us... doing one of our favorite things - listening to a story! We can't wait to see who will come in next...

Beautiful Baby

Mrs. Dupee had her beautiful baby girl on Sunday, December 6th. Congratulations to Mrs. Dupee and her family! Welcome to the world, Norah Grace! We will miss Mrs. Dupee while she is out on maternity leave, but know that Norah wants and needs her mommy at home!

The excitement continues...

We had more time for creating our Humdingers in Room 223 this afternoon! It was exciting to see working Humdingers! Creative minds make amazing physical models! Great thinking, fourth graders!

Another Author Share Day!

We enjoyed three pieces from three authors in our room today! We heard some fun poems, a news-worthy newspaper, and a funny commercial! Congratulations, writers!

More Humdinger Creations!

Making Humdingers!

There is a lot of excitement in our classroom during science this week! We are creating physical models of a humdinger. On Tuesday, Mrs. Wareham shared the "teacher model" of the humdinger - a machine that hums and then dings with the pull of the string, but did not show how it works. Now, we have been working hard to recreate the humdinger using provided materials. Most partner groups are having some success...and everyone is trying really hard! It is so fun!

The Drought Stopper

Is Mrs. Dupee Magic? No of course not... but I think I had them going for at least a little bit! :)

Today in science I showed them a magical invention called, "The Drought Stopper." You put 100ml into a container and out comes 500 ml! WOW.

After showing them the magic, they each created their own conceptual model of how they thought the mysterious box worked. It was really exciting to watch them come alive with excitement over the unknown.

After sharing with the class, we finally opened it up and showed them what was inside! This delighted many of them as they got pretty close with their ideas.

So no... Mrs. Dupee is not magic but it sure was fun trying to convince them otherwise. :)

Beat the Calculator

Today in math we played - Beat the Calculator. This is a perfect game to practice at home as well. All you need is a calculator and a deck of cards. One of you is the calculator and the other is the thinker.

The thinker turns over two cards which are to be multiplied together. The thinker does the problem in their head, the calculator person has to type in the numbers and can't state the answer until is appears on the screen.

Today we challenged ourselves and extended the numbers. For example if a 3 and a 4 were turned over, pairs decided to turn one or both numbers into multiples of 10. So 30 x 4, 3 x 40 or 30 x 40.

It was great fun. The noise level grew and grew because teams were getting so competitive and having a blast! Try it at home and let us know how it goes. ;)

Wow! Real World Black Boxes

In science today, we continued our investigation on Black Boxes. After learning some new vocabulary words: model, scientific collaboration, and consensus, we discussed black boxes (or mysteries) in our world today. An impressive list was generated including: Universe, planets, Area 51, alien life, heaven, God, love as an emotion, Santa, and the cure for cancer. I was so impressed by the deep thinking in room 223 today!