Friday, April 27, 2012

Final Day in Room 12

It has been a fun and enjoyable experience to work with these lovely children since december. They have taught me so much and hopefully they feel I taught them so much too. I will be posting pictures on here throughout the day, but I want to say thank you to all the people that look at this blog. You got to see all the fantastic things we are doing in room 12 at James John. I will definitely start blogging again in the fall when the school year starts up again. I just hope I have my own class to blog about. Thank you for the support and strength through my final semester at University of Portland.
~Daniel Morantte, the creator of this blog

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Mind Mangling Math

This week room 12 has been doing math testing and so all the students have been getting an extra dose of their math in the morning. So, as a de-stresser I decided that we do math games on rotation...This is what was going on in room 12 during math:



Julian and Kai are asking each other addition problems. They came up with really inventive problems.




Cesar and Eisel are practicing
their multiplication problems.  




Lucy and Parfait were on Mr. Morantte's
computer and were practicing equivalent
fractions.




Ignacio and Renne are 
practicing addition.

Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Founders Day

Mr. Leach will be in room 12 without Mr. Morantte's help. Mr. Morantte is doing a presentation on multiplication masks that we did earlier in the spring. On Founders Day, people from the University of Portland will get a chance to see what we do in room 12. 

Thursday, April 12, 2012

Nursery Rhymes: Room 12 style

We have been using old-fashioned nursery rhymes and changing them as we go along. We break the pattern. Here are 3 examples Room 12 has created so far...

I'm a little teapot
Short and stout.
Here is my handle;
Here is my spout.
When I get all steamed up,
I hear you shout because 
I burned your hand.
Don't you dare mess with me!
~Mr. Morantte

Humpty Dumpty sat on a brick wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
The guards tried to put him together.
Instead they ate him like eggs and ham.
~Mallory

Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon.
What I don't get is that
did the cow jump for the cat?
Did the cow jump over the moon because
the moon wanted to see the cow?
Okay, back to the story...
The little dog laughed to see such fun
and the dish ran away with the spoon.
Then they ran away and
A VERY BIG GIANT
named Jack
found the dish and the spoon.
So, Jack used the dish and spoon for lunch.
~Unknown

To be continued on Mr. Leach's Blog ...

"I Am From" Gallery Walk

On Monday we put our finished I am from poems on our tables and walked around as if we were in a museum and wrote compliments about the poems. Everyone was really respectful and had a great time.














Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Who is visiting Literacy Block?

Roald Dahl is one of the key authors that most children grow up with and room 12 decided that this author would be fun to read. 

George Henry Kranky is an 8 year-old boy who lives on a farm with his mother, father and grandmother. He is fed up with his Grandma's selfishness, grumpiness and her attitude towards him, especially after he becomes frightened by her dark secrets. George seeks to cure it by brewing a very special medicine to cure her. 
Mr. and Mrs. Twit are two ugly, smelly, nasty, stupid people who spend their lives playing nasty tricks on each other. They also enjoy being cruel to animals, which they do by luring birds to glue-smothered trees so they can be baked into bird pie, and tormenting their pet monkeys, Muggle-Wump and his family, by getting them to stand upside down, one on top of the other. They hate children, and Mrs. Twit often carries a walking stick in her right hand that she uses to hit children and animals.
The story is about a little girl named Sophie, after the author's granddaughter Sophie DahlOne night, when Sophie cannot fall asleep during the "witching hour", she sees a giant blowing something into the bedroom windows down the street. The giant notices her, reaches through the window, and carries her to his home in Giant Country.
In this story a boy from England now lives with his grandmother in her native Norway after his parents are killed in a car accident. Some nights later, the grandmother tells the boy how to recognize a real witch. While they look and act like ordinary women, they are really demons who only look human--which makes them all the more dangerous. 
The book begins where Charlie and the Chocolate Factory ends: Willy Wonka has just given Charlie the ownership of his factory, and they crash through the roof of Charlie's house with a flying elevator to inform his family of the good news.