Weather Stamina

January has been a little un-predictable. We haven't had a five day week. We have had holidays, floods, snow, and now ice. It's hard to keep our stamina going for reading and writing workshop. It is even harder to make sure place value is understood in Math.

But, I did have time to work a little more on my home office.

I wanted these little shelves. They were a great buy at TJ Maxx. But, oh they gave us a run when we tried to hang them. Let's just say swiss cheese walls. Which meant some dry wall patch and that gave me the dreaded task an opportunity to paint the walls a little lighter color. I used SW Versatile Gray--mixed at Lowes in their brand. This paint is eggshell finish and much more durable. See--the shelves are now hung (minus decorations) and no spackling staring at me when I work on the computer. And I changed the room arrangement a bit.

I made the bookcase a different direction. That;s what it deserved after having to empty several shelves again in order to paint the walls. I got a $10 table cloth at Wal-Mart to cover the table top. I know...it's a dining room table. But it has memories!

And I removed the blanket hangar from this shelf and painted it black. (I tried sawing that pole until I realized that there were screws in the outside that held it on. 10 seconds and a power drill and that baby was gone! 

I've already purchased a nine-cube bookcase to go below this shelf. That should give me extra storage so I won't have so many piles!

Now, on to school. Our theme this week is Stormy Weather, Seems appropriate! I made a powerpoint to use with Learn360 and PebbleGo lessons. It allows us to use fewer paper copies and use the whiteboard to work together. I plan on the kids using their reader response journals to work on this also.

Weather powerpoint by Jean

We are going to brainstorm types of weather. There is a great video on Learn360 about the Alphabet of Weather. I plan on the kids watching and listing on slide 3. I'll probably print that one off for us to use. Slide 3 will follow along with our basal story: Stormy Weather. We will compare and contrast extreme weather according to moisture or sunny days. The kids love to work with the Tornado in the bottle. Since we are writing "how to" this will work out great!
Since we are all into assessment the last slide will serve as our formative assessment on the study. So, lots of research, lots of visuals, and hopefully nice weather to actually go five days!