We are a year round school. That means that we don't start school in September, go until June, and have the summer months off. We have three different tracks (Track A, Track B, and Track C) and our school starts on July 1st. 2 tracks begin school July 1st (Track B and Track C), and they are "on-track" while the other (Track A) is "off-track." The tracks take turn being on and off because of overcrowding. While one track is off another track can use those classrooms.

We are off track beginning this week and won't be back for 2 months! While we are happy to be on vacation, we will miss blogging with new friends in Georgia. Unfortunately, we got started blogging late in the year and since we won't be back until May, we won't have much time to get to know the fabulous bloggers from the Wrinkles group. This is sad for us. But, I do hope that during the short time we will have in May and June, we can blog with them and--who knows what the future will bring!

On Thursday, I was in your class showing you how to upload your idiom drawings onto your site when we discovered that you had received some great comments from the 5th grade students in Georgia, the ones who created the idioms on Idioms Are Fun!. It was so exciting! Some of you were curious about where Georgia is so I created this map to help us all understand the distance and location better.

Take a look at this map of the United States. Our state, California, is on the left in red. Their state, Georgia, is on the right also in red. They're both on the coast so what do you think they have in common?


create your own visited states map
or check out these Google Hacks.

Posted by, Ms. Peralta

I learned about the idiom "Lend me a hand." It means you need help with a problem.

Here it is--our new blog!

We'll be blogging about our ideas and sending them out to all our readers around the world! Pretty cool, huh!?!

Thursday my students started blogging. They were excited to learn about the process and meet SuperThinker. They were able to answer SuperThinker's question, "What do you like about reading?" The first day everybody except 6 people were able to blog. They seemed to catch on very quickly. The next day I allowed the remaining 6 to blog their comments. They blogged while doing seatwork. Therefore, it did not interrupt my direct instruction and only took a few minutes out of their independent work time!

I feel like it went really smoothly. It was a smooth transition after they got the hang of blogging. Tomorrow, after reading the new blog post from SuperThinker, we will blog again. Hopefully, it will go smoothly.

After the class has gotten the hang of it, we will begin blogging groups, each group focusing on a different topic:
LiteratureCircleBloggingGroup
DramaBloggers
ThemeBloggers
OfInterestBloggers--I'd like to focus that group on math, social studies or some other topic.

This will hopefully eliminate the time issues, lack of computers, and reinforce what is taught in class.