Mrs. Comincioli's Classroom Corner

October Book-It Reading logs were due today! If you haven’t turned yours in signed, please send it in tomorrow.

November Book-it reading logs came home today. Students should be reading everynight to reach their goals. November calendars are due December 1st.

One of our guided reading groups is reading a book about the Great Smokey Mountains. Today we were reading about the Eastern Screech Owl. We learned that the Eastern Screech Owl doesn’t build its own nest. It lives in nests other birds have made, in caves, or in hollow trees. We made the connection that owls are “green” animals because they reuse nests created by other birds. If animals can be “green”, so can we!

For the past six months, we’ve been reading for the Book-It program. The Book-It program is thru Pizza Hut. We each set a goal to read a minimum of 400 minutes each month at home. Our goal was to have the whole class read, complete, and turn in their book-it calendars each month. If we achieved our goal, the class earned a pizza party. We really love to have “food” parties and we achieved our goal! We can’t wait to have our class pizza party!!

We have several questions for our friends in Leeds. We can’t wait to hear your answers!

1. What type of government does your country have?

2. How old are you?

3. Do you have Xbox 360s?

4. What is your school routine each day?

5. Do you have fundraisers to earn money for your school?

6. Do any of you play on a football team?

7. Do you have a science fair?

8. Why do you drive on the left side?

9. What is Worlds Math Day?

10. Do you play baseball?

11. What is year 6?

12. How many subjects do you study and what are they?

13. Is your school big?

14. Do you play any musical instruments?

15. Is your school fun?

16. Do you have McDonalds?

17. How big is your playground and do you have recess?

18. Why do you call french fries “chips”?

19. How long is your school day?

20. Do you have field day?

21. Do you play basketball?

22. Do you play rugby?

23. What is your weather like?

24. Do you eat goat meat?

25. What is it like in England?

26. What is your favorite professional sports team and what sport?

27. What types of soda do you like to drink?

28. Do you take school field trips?

By: Tony, Johnny, Hunter, Yaxeni, Kayla, Jessica, Brianne, Andrew B., Ryan

6N’s Blogtastic Bloginess from Leeds, UK, has posted several questions for our classroom. We thought we would post our answers here.

School in America is probably similar to school in the United Kingdom. We are a multi-age class of 4th and 5th grade students. We are 9, 10, and 11 years old. Our school is medium size. We have 337 2nd-5th grade students. We go to school five days a week for 6 hours a day. We study science, math, social studies, reading and writing. We have reading groups where we read different novels, like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, Hatchet, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, and Crispus Attucks. In math, we learn about decimals, fractions, multiplication, algebra, geometry, division, and problem solving. This year we are learning the scientific method, matter, electricity, weather, animals, and oceans. In social studies, we learn about immigration, Abraham Lincoln, pioneers, the Civil War, slavery, and the Revolutionary War. For lunch time, some of us bring lunches from home, or else we have choices for hot lunch. We aren’t big fans of the hot lunches! After lunch, we have recess where we play on the swings, the monkey bars, and the slide. The slide is really fast when there is snow on it! We play tag and basketball. Our special class are gym, music, art, tech, and library. In gym we play dodgeball, kickball, soccer, volleyball, and we do stations. In music we learn about the different instruments and practice the recorders. We play music games and we sing in a winter and spring concert. In art we made models of suns and bowls out of clay, recreate artists paintings and make mirror images. In tech we learn how to use the internet and how to search, how to make graphs, and we’ve used Google Earth. Next year the 5th graders will go to middle school at Carl Sandburg.

Spirit day is where you wear the school colors to school. Our school colors are blue and yellow and our mascot is the leopards.

ISAT tests are Illinois State Achievement Tests that we take once a year. We take 3 reading and 3 math tests. Fourth graders take 2 science tests and 5th graders take 1 writing test. We take these tests so our teachers can see what we know and they can put us in reading and math groups.

We like football, soccer, baseball, Nascar, and hockey. We like to play Xbox 360, Wii, and Playstation 3. Fifth grade students go to Camp Duncan. They stay over night in cabins and do fun activities like rock climbing, archery, canoing, tie dyed shirts, make music with Indian drums and decode Indian writing. We also sat around a camp fire, sang songs, and made smores. We also went on a night hike. It was a lot of fun!