Our Dot Day

We had Dot Day at our school two weeks ago, you are probably wondering what dot day is. Dot Day is where we read a book called The Dot and talk about the moral of the story. The Dot is a very interesting book about a girl who is upset that she can’t make art. So her teacher tells her to make a mark and see where it takes her. She does and she becomes a great artist. The reason we celebrate Dot Day is because, our teacher wants to show us to be creative and that great things can come out of it.

 To celebrate we did a few stations. The stations were painting a dot on a recycled, ultimate connect the dots, a “make your mark” tweet, a “make your mark” blog, sidewalk dot, and the Tagxedo dot. We even had Dot Day Cafe' full of fun dot snacks and we wore dots. All of the stations were amazingly fun!

We’re going to tell you about some of the stations. The first station was to paint a dot using lids of jars. We painted them in a way that represented who were are as unique individuals. I painted painted mine by doing the rim purple with all different colored dots in the center -GH.  I painted mine with a purple rim as well with a blueish greyish middle -MS.

Our second station was the ultimate connect the dots. We had a bunch of different options. We don't really know what they made because no one finished them because they took a lot of time. Most of us took them home to finish.

Third, we did a make your mark tweet. Which means we tweeted about how we could use our unique talents to make our mark on the world. That means how we can make the world a better place. We even had college students from Birmingham Southern College tweet back to us. Then, we wrote it on our Idea Wall.

Fourth, we made a “make your mark” blog on Kidblog. This was basically our “make your mark” tweet but longer and more detailed. We had to create a specific plan to put our ideas into action and explain why we chose how we’d like to make the world a better place.

Fifth, was to create a sidewalk dot in our outdoor classroom. Using sidewalk chalk,  we went outside and create a collage of our dots. It was so pretty by the end of the day.

Sixth, we did a really cool craft project on the computer where you take all the words that describe you and make a dot shaped Tagxedo of it.

These are the stations we did, and they were so much fun! Dot Day was really fun and I wish we could do it again! I really liked the book and the positive message it sends. Dot Day was awesome!

BreakoutEDU: The Run-On Renegade and Grammar Girl

One Tuesday, we walked in and we were told we had the chance to do a BreakoutEDU. This time it was themed with the Run-On Renegade and Grammar Girl….and The Run-On Renegade was actually in our classroom trying to play out one of her dastardly deeds.  The Run-On Renegade had actually captured Grammar Girl and stolen her utility belt which contained all her superpowers. Without Grammar Girl, the world wouldn’t have been able to communicate clearly. We had to try to breakout part of Grammar Girl’s belt before the world dissolved into chaos. The clock was ticking. We only had 45 minutes to save the world.

When we entered the room, we had a newspaper story laid on top of the Breakout EDU box. This news story was about Grammar Girl and how Run-On- Renegade wanted to take over the world. Throughout the story, letters were capitalized that shouldn't have been. The letters spelled out LOOK IT UP. We then thought about it and checked the dictionaries. We found a key to one of the locks! Attached to the key was a Mystery Word puzzle. This puzzle led us to find out the letter lock combination. The word was fiend (enemy). Somewhere in the room, we found a paragraph that we read; it was called The Paragraph Protector. We answered questions about the paragraph, and after many tries figured out that was the combination to the 4-number lock! That was our last lock!

We were so excited! We just knew that we had broken out. But inside the box, we found another box with a piece of paper. On the piece of paper was a summary of Schooled with some blanks in them. We had to fill them out using proper capitalization. We were allowed to look at the book. We were also given a UV flashlight. With the UV flashlight, we could see invisible ink where some of the letters were circled. There was a number code, but when we tried that that did not work. We tried using letters and it spelled out LINKS. This puzzle was full of red herrings. We then went to our links section on our class blog. We had to click on Are you COPS? to take a quiz on grammar. We were typing as fast as we possibly could (incorrect, correct). At the end it said,¨ Way TO go. High FIVES FOR everyone.¨ The code was 2, 5, 4 (the numbers in the sentence). We rushed over to the box and put in the code. It worked! We were very excited because we broke out first and we got a piece of Grammar Girl’s superpowered belt.

BreakoutEDU is so much fun! We wonder when we’ll get to do it again.

~ K.C., T. K., E.J.

Our Lit Centers

Literacy Centers, or Lit Centers, are tasks that the students in Mrs.Ramsay's have every week. Lit centers help us learn about the topics we are doing in ELA. They are educational and help us with growing and learning. Sometimes it is partner text talks and at other times we can do blog posts on Kidblog. We have done lit centers based on our read aloud, Schooled. We have done some based on our partner text. We have different ones every week or so depending on what standards we are working towards mastering. They sometimes are graded assessments and sometimes they are for practice.  Some of them we can work with our friends, and others we work on independently. Lit centers are also really fun. This week, we are doing one where we take letter tiles and try to make as many words as we can. This helps us learn word patterns and word parts to strengthen our writing and communicating. These are just some different things that we do during lit centers.

~By L. E.