We ARE a Bucket Filling School

 Yesterday was a dream come true not only for me professionally, but for Guardino as an elementary school. We had an assembly that revolved around the book Have You Filled Someone's Bucket Today? It is an amazing book that focuses on how we should treat each other. It has a positive message for people of all ages. Every student at Guardino was given a copy of the book which were donated by Mr. and Mrs. DeMay (retired TI teacher's) and one student was chosen from each classroom to read a page from the book in front of the entire school.

 The students were so excited to have a book of their very own to take with them.

 Jessica Bourcy introduced the book for us.

 We put the entire book on a Power Point projector.

 Principal Clark spoke about the importance of manners, respect and how we treat one another.

 Our special guest reader's.

Thank you to everyone who made this day possible. It was wonderful.

Toondoo

 My fifth grader's just keep amazing me. We just finished a book titled Slob by Ellen Potter and for our project we tackled creating a Toondoo from the website http://www.toondoo.com/

 Students were able to choose a challenging vocabulary word from the text of our book and to then create a cartoon strip that had characters from the book as well as content to teach the vocabulary word. They did a fantastic job and they amaze me more and more as the year progresses.

At the end of this book we also had to say farewell to Kelsey. She has outgrown our group and will no longer need AIS services. I am so proud to let you go, you deserve it.

Mrs. Dermady's reading group read the book Slob and for our latest project we created comic strips based on vocabulary words and character situations from the book. I am MORE than proud of the finished products from these students. Way to go!

Bailie's vocabulary word was "puny".

Isaac's vocabulary word was "unkempt".

Kelsey's vocabulary word was "premonition".

Mason's vocabulary word was "exemption".

Our next book is...Leepike Ridge. I'm sure we will have another fantastic project to share next month!

 We just finished reading the book Because of Winn-Dixie so what should we do next? Of course we should have a "Winn-Dixie" party  and watch the movie. We mirrored the party that the characters in the book and movie had while still keeping it educational. Students were asked to take notes during the movie and compare/contrast the similarities and differences between the two. They are now writing an essay comparing the two. Who says reading and writing can't be fun?

We always have fun in Mrs. Charlton's Class!

A Dream Come True

We are well on our way to getting ready for the big "Bucket Assembly" on February 16th and our hallway shows it! Stay tuned for more updates and pictures!



Welcome 2012!

We haven't let any grass grow under our feet in 2012.

We started off our week presenting our Voki's for the book Schooled by Gordan Korman.
I was very proud of my fifth grade students for their creativity, technology skills and for the wonderful presentations they were able to give to their classmates.

Each student chose their favorite character from the book, wrote a bio, typed it into Voki, choose their character image, voice and in the end they turned out fantastic!

We would HIGHLY recommend this book, it was an amazing read.

Fig Pudding

My fifth grade group finally finished reading Fig Pudding by Ralph Fletcher. It is the wonderful and yet heart wrenching story of a year in the life of the Abernathy Family; their ups and downs. I starts on Christmas of one year and wraps up on Christmas of the following year. The kids LOVED it and we had a fantastic time reading and discussing it.
During the story the 6 Abernathy kids make stollen each and every year with their grandmother. I was able to buy some stollen and bring it in for the kids to try.

Can you tell it is getting close to Christmas?

The consensus was that the stollen was pretty gross, only one student liked it, BUT they can now say they have tried it in their life!

What a fun group.

This student loved it and asked to bring the rest home.

Our next book...Because of Winn Dixie, an all time favorite of Mrs. C.