Open Houses

Grace's Open House

 It was fun to go see what Grace has been up to in her classroom.

Grace's "first" major project- a report about an ocean animal of her choosing- blue whales.  

She did a great job!

Jeremy's Open House

Jeremy's Year-End Performance was held the same night as his Open House.  His class sang 3 songs and much to my shock and delight, Jeremy actually sang!  YAY!

Following the performance, Jeremy was proud to show off his classroom.  They had been learning about how the body works, so everything on display revolved around that.

Jeremy with Miss Debbie

Jane's Open House

This year, my overall theme for the classroom was "Hollywood."  It has been fun trying to incorporate that into my room all year long. 

I didn't do a general theme for my class' Open House.  It was nice just to be able to showcase work that we've been doing.  By the way, my desks are not usually set up like that- it was just for our Open House.

 State Floats (on the desks in "parade formation" and State Brochures (hanging from the ceiling, accessible for parents to take down and read).  Each student chose a state to research about.  Rather than assigning a standard essay report, the kids still had to write informative paragraphs, but they were assembled into a brochure format.  This way, I was also able to tie in text features.  I've done State Floats for years and I LOVE seeing my kids' creativity!

 Tying together Science, Art, and S.S. standards. The kids had to illustrate their own version of an animal and plant cell.  In addition to labeling its parts, they had to define each part using an analogy or figurative language.  Finally, to tie this into S.S., I found a picture of each student's state animal and state flower.  I cut off half of the picture and they had to draw in the missing half.  Some of their artwork looked like the original- I was so impressed!

Odes Poetry using Figurative Language.  I let each student use my digital camera to take a picture of whatever they wrote about to display with their ode.  They loved that!

 Each day for several weeks, we learned about each of the 50 states.  Kids pretended to take "snapshots" of something that they might have seen on our pretend road trip and then wrote about each snapshot.

 I love teaching kids through simulations!  For this particular activity, the kids were divided into groups to learn about early settlements.  The simulation gave my class a glimpse into settlement daily life, relationships with the Native Americans, and in the process, they had to work together to build a paper version of what a settlement consisted of.

 Students chose a famous American to research about.  Then, they had to create a Facebook page as if they were that particular famous American. 

In this math activity, students got to imagine what their dream house would look like, while reinforcing their ability to determine perimeter, area, fractions, percents and decimals.

This activity incorporated figurative language with art.  The kids were supposed to create a visual image of a word, then come up with examples of figurative language that related to the word.

I think my favorite part of the whole night is when my kids actually arrive.  Each one is supposed to dress up as something representing their state, whether it's a famous person or a symbol.  Then, they get interviewed by another adult in the room.  This year's class came up with the BEST costumes! Love it!!!

Jason's Open House

Okay, I would love to post about Jason's Open House, but he didn't take any pictures.  It just isn't the same in middle school.  Out of his 165 students, only 25 came!

Open House is a time to celebrate hard work and student learning- a fun time was had at all of our Open Houses (ok, maybe not so much at Jason's, hahaha).