In the book, I Ain't Gonna Paint No More, by David Shannon, we took a look at how the author moves the story from a black and white palette at the start of the book to a whirlwind of colors by the end. We enjoyed the story of a boy who discovers a box of paints in the closet, despite his promise to his mother that he "ain't gonna paint no more".
The book, The Secret Shortcut, shows us how to use sequence words to move the reader through a story with ease. This books invites the reader to experience the adventures of the characters right along with them, from beginning to end.
The Z Was Zapped is a great example of using the alphabet as an organizer. We enjoyed reading through this book and trying to predict the action word that was happening to each letter in this story.
One of our favorites this week was The Mystery of Eatum Hall. We read this book a few times. The first time that we read it, we only read the words and didn't really study the illustrations. The clues for solving this mystery were in the pictures. Mysteries are a wonderful way to teach about organization. We couldn't wait to uncover the evidence in the pictures to solve this mystery. We reflect, wonder and anticipate, largely because of the timing of clues in this story. This was one delicious mystery!
A Grand Old Tree was a story of a tree that flowered, bore fruit, sowed seeds and ultimately falls when she is old and brittle. We enjoyed how the author brought the tree to life through personification, giving the tree life-like qualities. This story is a birth-to-death story, which can easily be replicated in the student's own writing as they apply their knowledge of the life cycle.
In another story by David Shannon, The Rain Came Down, the author does a nice job of using cause and effect to organize the story. When it was raining, everyone in the story was having a bad day. But when the sun came up, things quickly got better. Everyone's day was much brighter and happier. The repetitive line "and the rain came down" also helped to tie the story together.
In The Great Gracie Chase: Stop That Dog! we enjoyed the dog who loved her quiet little home until the painters came to the house. This book helped us to identify the problem and solution as there were multiple ones in this story. We also noted how this book is similar to The Gingerbread Man.
The organization in What's Up, What's Down? was literally up and down. We started the story with a mole who was wondering what is above him as he looks at the roots, grass and trees. We continued to move up in the story until we reached above the clouds and then returned back down until we reach the ocean floor. This is a simple and logical way to organize this book.
The Red Book showed us that illustrations are so expressive that no words are necessary to move a story along. A young girl in the city finds a red book on the sidewalk while across the world, a boy on a remote island finds a similar book in the sand. We discover this is no ordinary book. These books contain magic, which eventually unites the children.
In the book, The Magic Fan, the story is told with a foldout fan on each page. We can see a clear development of a story full of excellent examples of sequencing and transition words throughout.
Dear Mr. Blueberry is organized around a series of letters from a young girl who thinks she has a whale living in her pond and her teacher, Mr. Blueberry, is understandably skeptical. This book helped us to show how letters are organized and the students were encourage to write their own letters too.
I Wanna Iguana was another book that used letters to move the story along. In this story, a boy wants a pet iguana more than anything and writes his mother to try to convince her that an iguana would be the perfect pet for him. It's amazing how the power of writing to help persuade even the most stubborn mother.
We began our next focus on writing, conventions. We learned that we need to try to spell our words correctly, use capitalization appropriately and finish our sentences with punctuation. The first book we read was Where Are You Going? To See My Friend! Not only did we look at punctuation in this story, we looked at how the author organized this book. This book is written in English at the beginning and Japanese at the end. We compared the two languages and thought it was funny that Japanese read from the back to the front and from top to the bottom. The author and illustrator used pictures of the animals in this story to represent their dialogue in the story. We can use pictures when we do not know how to spell words, but we are phonetically trying to spell our words correctly. When we are unsure of how a word is spelled, we can underline it for review later. We don't want our spelling to hinder our writing process.
Another favorite David Shannon book is David Goes to School. We focused on capitalization and punctuation in this story. We love David books.
David Shannon books are fun to us to read because many of the characters are naughty in the story, and the kids can totally relate. In Duck on a Bike we looked at punctuation and capitalization. We will use this book again next week too. It is a funny favorite.
Who doesn't love the pigeon books? We read Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! and focused on the importance of punctuation. We read the book without punctuation and noted that it doesn't always make sense to pause at places where there is not a comma or a period.
We will continue to work on the conventions trait next week too as we explore other books further. Lots of stories have problems and solutions. Not only did we identify those in the above stories, we also talked about the author's purpose. We practiced summarizing and retelling stories too. Please make sure you are using these strategies with your child at home. In the story Hello, Hello! we learned about the ways that animals say hello to each other.
We continue to work on our Daily 5 each day. We added a new pocket chart station called Silly Sentences. The students color code words to make silly sentences and record them on paper. We had fun with this center.
Sight words this week were our, two, they and her. We also worked on the "un" word family. We took another spelling test this week and began working on our lowercase letters and numerals in handwriting.
During our science rotation, our focus was on force, motion and energy. In Mrs. Langham's class we watched a BrainPop video on force. Mrs. Langham brought in some of baby Noah's toys from home and we talked about whether they were push toys, pull toys, or both. We then sorted toys using a Venn diagram.
Mrs. Hobbs is currently out of town and will return on Tuesday. She will post the exciting happenings in her class when she returns. Stay tuned!
Report cards went home today. Please remember to sign the gold envelope and return it to your child's teacher.
I hope to see you at the carnival tomorrow.
Hi everyone. I'm so happy to be back with the kids! We had a blast - literally- last week in Science. We explored the concepts of force and motion with store bought and homemade toys. We even made a paperclip "dance" with magnetic force.
After Traveling Tuesday, we recorded our thinking in our Logs. Scientists write to communicate ideas.
Franky likes to see what we are doing in Science.
We also did an experiment to see the strength of different magnets.
Another experiment looked at how close a paper clip can get to a magnet before a force is felt.
We read two really good books about force and motion.
In Social Studies we looked at map keys, reading a map, and completed a paper about Hill's carnival map. I heard the carnival was lots of fun!
We also saw a video about maps.
In Mathematics we worked on filling a design three different ways,
filling a design with the fewest/largest amount of shapes, and sorting polygons and quadrilaterals. Oh, and we read some good books, too.
Goodbye to week 9. Week 10, here we come!
