bye bye bye.

this is an actual conversion that happened earlier this week. kids: 'mrs. albonetti, can't we listen to a cee lo green song?' me: 'do you even know who is singing this song?' kids: 'no.' me: 'then zip it and listen. you need to hear real music.'
i am teaching a generation who doesn't know a NSYNC song when they hear one. bye bye bye. are you kidding me?! how is it possible you have lived on this earth for 11 years and never heard bye bye bye? isn't that un-american or something? you better believe nsync has been on blast for the past 3 days. (during independent work time...haha i promise i do teach) i will teach those students about classic american boy bands if its the last thing i do. cee lo green over nsync. i think not.
other than that...we have been hard at work.
i finished my focus wall. finally.

 it was love at first sight when i saw these letters from here. they now live there.

 speaking of taking forever to finish. we finished hatchet. finally! after reading the novel, we watched the movie a cry in the wild. compared and contrasted the two via an individual venn diagram & then i put the kids to work in groups to create a much larger scale venn diagram and let them use the greatest invention in all the world. chalk. they were enamored with the chalk. they cheered for the colors they got. bickered over who got to write first. an all around hit. go figure.

 after comparing and contrasting we dove right back into our skill of summarization. i used the follow the yellow brick road strategy from here. the students followed their own yellow brick road with post its. we then took the post its and used them to create a summary for the back of their book cover projects.

 did i say working hard? i meant hardly working. well, that is those students who stayed out of trouble and turned in all their homework. it pays to work at school right down the block from a rite aid and a park. double thumbs up for enrichment days.

 our finished book cover projects. i had the students use oil pastels and we practiced color blending techniques. super fun. i was pleasantly surprised with the end results...the students did really well!

 gotta love integers. especially when you have to add/subtract/multiply&divide them.

cheers to another work week coming to a close. tgif. well close enough.