Hello...and see ya later...

Hello and welcome to MID-AUGUST...can you believe summer is ALMOST OVER? Me neither.
I hope you have been spending your time enjoying yourself...and reading, maybe?! My family just spent the last week at Rehoboth Beach! We had amazing weather and spent tons of time outside...it was a lot of fun!

Now I am home and starting to think about the upcoming school year...do you have your school supplies yet? If not, the lists are on the school website, so you can print them off for your shopping trip! My kids did their school supply shopping at the beach, so they were excited to come home and get backpacks ready. Don't get me wrong...they are all happy they still have two weeks...but can you believe we start in only two more weeks?!

Now here's the part that's hard...it's time to say, "See ya later..." I choose not to say goodbye because I will continue to see each one of you...however...the blog needs to turn over to the new class now...I am mailing their Welcome letters tomorrow and they will be checking out this blog soon...so their welcome message will be up mid week.

You all will always hold a special place in my heart...and I will see you at Open House.

Love,
Mrs. Wills

WHATCHA BEEN DOING? Part Three

Emma B. has had a terrific summer...

she designed and sewed her own dress...

...and her family put a pool in their backyard!!

What have YOU been doing?!

WHATCHA BEEN DOING? PART TWO...

Can you believe it's August? Soon, I will be turning this blog over to my new class...so let me know what you've been up to ASAP...and I will share it on here for everyone to see.

I heard from Christopher...guess what he's been doing...

...celebrating his birthday,

...hitting a water park,
...and going to an Orioles game!
Who else wants to share what they've been doing this summer?

Whatcha been up to?

Answer my question with pictures...please send me a picture that shows something fun you've been doing...

Wanna know what Jake and Nicky have been up to?

Eating yummy wings at Buffalo Wild Wings!

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Where did time go?!?! How is it that a whole school year has gone by already?!

I have just finished my first morning of curriculum writing and I am missing your kids...please encourage them to email me throughout the summer...if you have any cool summer pix, send them to me, and I'll post them here!!

But, as promised, here is how the last week and a half of school went down...

I feel so great about your kids as writers! They have truly embraced the writing process and I kept them writing up until the last day! The kids were working on persuasive essays...they peer conferenced and then revised and edited their drafts. They have learned that giving each other feedback is as important as receiving it...they worked hard to help each other! Their final draft was a cursive masterpiece! I was thrilled with how many kids used their strong writing voice and outstanding word choice while persuading their audience in whichever direction they chose. Each student should have brought home that graded final draft as well as all of the Writer's Workshop pieces from this year...our class was full of authors!!

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Did ya hear about S.T.E.M. day?

Your child probably brought home a certificate stating that he/she participated in S.T.E.M. day...do you know what it means?

Your child can tell you, but I'll save you the time...

S.T.E.M. is the acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.

The fifth graders at UES created and presented lessons in all four of these subject areas and taught the rest of the school...it was a wonderful collaborative effort! Our class visited three different lessons...we went into the Great Heron Wetlands to learn about it's importance and some of it's inhabitants, we learned how to extract DNA from strawberries, and we participated in a hands-on engineering lesson called, "Pillar Power"...in this engineering lesson, the kids had to create a circular base using only an 8 1/2 x 11 sheet of white paper...and then see how many books they could stack on the base without it collapsing...when our time was up, they basically had to kick us out because my class wanted to keep working on the challenge!

Take a look at some pictures from our S.T.E.M. afternoon!

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Each student had been working on creating a board game and we spent the afternoon of our play performances in the media center enjoying each other's creations! See for your self!