In the story, Yesterday I Had the Blues, we saw how the author used color words to describe the feelings of his family. We tried to add color words to our writing to show our voice.
In Pictures from our Vacation, we enjoyed seeing how the pictures that two children took while on vacation with their family told a story. Many of us have been on vacations and have taken pictures. This story helps to spark memories to engage our writing.
We continued to talk about parts of a sentence and read more about nouns and verbs. In the book below, we learned how nouns and verbs need to work together in order to make a complete sentence or thought. We are trying to apply that to our writing as well.
A very simple book to teach nouns and verbs was Who Hops? This was also a silly book too. It told of different animals that could hop, but the author always teased us by telling us one animal that couldn't hop, such as a cow. Then the author told us what a cow could do. The animals were the nouns in the story and the actions that they did were the verbs. We explored animals that could swim, slither, crawl, etc. too.
We are trying to work on our endings in the stories we are writing. We loved the story, The Perfect Nest. It is about a cat who builds a perfect nest so that he can trap a chicken to get the egg to make a perfect omelet. Little did he know that he also invited a duck and a goose to the nest and couldn't get them to leave. We loved the surprise ending of this story. Ask your child about it.
Room on the Broom is such a great mentor text to teach from. We talked about rhyming words, patterns in a story, descriptive words and surprise endings. This book was definitely one of our favorites this week and was very entertaining.
My Dog is as Smelly as Dirty Socks was definitely a silly book. This book is full of similes. We are trying to use those in our writing to make things more descriptive.
Max's Words is a fun story about a boy who collects words to envy his brother's stamp and coin collections. His brothers are very curious when he begins to put together words to make a story and beg for Max to share with them. We enjoy putting words together to make stories and love to share them too.
We practiced retelling stories by using the four books below. Each book had a main character (somebody) who wanted something, but then something happened and so they had to do something. Somebody wanted but so is what I call this strategy.
We then filled out an organizer to help us retell the story.
We worked on s blends in phonics this week by reading several stories and sorting pictures by their beginning sounds.
We also worked on r blends too.
We read the book, Thanksgiving is for Giving Thanks and talked about the things that we are thankful for. We also started a gratitude journal.
We have been discussing the stages of writing and are very exciting to be fixing up one piece to get it to the publishing phase. Mrs. Langham has been conferencing with us and we are making changes. Some of us have begun to self-edit too.
Mrs. Langham's class enjoyed getting together with our buddies. We read the book, Turkey Trouble, which is about a turkey who is afraid he is going to be eaten so he disguises himself.
We then worked with our buddies to make a wanted poster and to come up with a disguise for our turkey.
During our traveling Tuesday science day, we continued our talk on energy. In Mrs. Langham's class, we talked about sound vibrations. We compared how sound travels through the air (gases) with how sounds travels through string (solids). We did an experiment where we hit a hangar on a table and then we tied string around the hangar and wrapped the string around our fingers and stuck our fingers in our ears. We were surprised at how much different the sound was and how much louder it was too.
In Mrs. Clark's rotation for Traveling Tuesday we did an experiment on bending light.
In Mrs. Hobbs' rotation we saw a demonstration about shadows.
Check it out here.
We watched how the position of the light source changes the shadow. Then we created and traced shadows using items from our pencil box. To finish the lesson, we matched objects with their shadow.
We read a funny, funny book about a fly who moves to different places.
Another story that we read showed us that science discovery is all around us.
We had two topics to talk about this week in Social Studies - the presidential election and Veterans Day. We read a book about the election process,
had a great discussion about what qualities we think the president should have,
learned about steps to become president,
and saw President Obama give a speech about his re-election. We thought and wrote about what we would say if we were president.
We also read two stories about our uniqueness. The first was about a doll who finds his place
and the second is about finding out what you are good at and doing that well.
To celebrate those who have served our country, we read a story about the importance of Veterans Day and
wrote an acrostic poem.
Some of us made "thank you" cards for veterans.
We saw photographs of memorials (and discussed what a memorial is) to veterans in Washington D.C. and we heard a story about the Vietnam War Memorial.
Friday's assembly honored veterans.
In Mathematics we played Calla with Ms. Rosso.
We also made the numeral 50 with mini crackers. Yummy!
We even listened to some 50's tunes.
We completed story problems and we even told our own math stories.
We played Quick Images with squares and talked about how the designs were the same/different.
Combinations for 9 and 10 keeps us thinking! This activity is a challenge to make sure all squares are used, sides connect, and the totals are correct.
We played a new doubles game. Knowing doubles helps us with quick computation.
When we are done with our work, we get to make choices.
As you can see, we are busy learners! That is why Mrs. Hobbs and Mrs. Langham talked a lot this week about using class time for working and doing best work. We need to be sure we are focused so that we can show and check our good thinking. This is especially true when we think an activity is "easy"; that's when most errors occur.
