Week 10

We had another wonderful week of diving into mentor books to help us with both our reading and writing. Animals Should Definitely Not Wear Clothing had hilarious illustrations depicting the absurdity of clothing for animals and showing students why animals are perfect just the way they are. In this story, the author uses underlining to emphasize or heighten meaning in words.

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day is about a boy who wakes up with gum in his hair and he has a feeling that it is going to be a bad day. Things spiral downward from there. This was also a book to show the importance of using commas. 

In The Garden on Green Street just as neighborhood residents were celebrating the beautiful community garden that they had created, they receive notice that the land has been purchased and is to be turned into a parking lot. We learned how they solved their problem. This inspiring story looked at many conventions. We loved the organization and the words that helped move this story along (first, then, next and last). We also enjoyed the letter that was written in the middle of the book too.

Commas really do make a difference and if we misuse them, it can change the whole meaning. We enjoyed how the proper use of commas in all the right places can really make a big difference in the book, Eats, Shoots and Leaves.

Our Librarian Won't Tell Us ANYTHING is a hilarious story about how a little girl is convinced that the librarian is unhelpful because she won't give her what she asks for. But when she is paired with another student, the librarian is really giving her the tools to find the information she needs so that she might be successful on her own. Her collaboration with the other student blossoms. This book teaches us many lessons, but we focused on the author's use of using all capital letters to emphasize key words. 

In Tulip Sees America we learn of a boy's desire to tour America. Growing up, his parents were homebodies, so when the boy is older, he takes a trip across the country with his dog, Tulip. This book was great to use for organization and detail. We also paid close attention to the use of capital letters for names of places.

The favorite book of the week was The Great Fuzz Frenzy. Life in prairie-dog hole is peaceful until, out of nowhere, a big, round object falls from the sky (a tennis ball) and creates chaos. At first the animals are apprehensive, but once they realize that the object will cause them no harm, they begin plucking green fuzz from the ball and turning it into scarves, capes, tutus, and other accessories. When the ball is plucked bald, there's an all-out war. Big Bark, the leader steps in to wage peace only to find himself in peril forcing the other prairie dogs to band together. Not only was this an enjoyable book, it is almost entirely made up of dialogue, so we focused on the use of quotation marks in a story.

Beatrice Doesn't Want To really captivated our attention. It is a spot-on characterization of the overburdened big brother and the self-centered sister. Henry has a book report to do and must take his book-despising sister to the library with him. During the first two trips to the library, Beatrice does nothing but whimper and whine and pester her brother. But on the third trip to the library, the librarian's read-aloud takes hold of her imagination and changes her mind about books forever. We paid close attention to the carefully crafted prose and the repeated phrase in this book "But, I don't want to."

Aunt Flossie's Hat is a wonderful book that tells how stories created from memories are often the best. Aunt Flossie has so many hats and each hat has a story to tell. This book help our suspense as we were curious how Aunt Flossie was able to retrieve her favorite hat that had blown into the water. All of us raised our hands with stories to tell of grandparents and other relatives and memories that we have. What a great way to springboard new stories. These are all great story starters and we loved the author's attention to detail.

Punctuation Takes a Vacation is a book about punctuation that left the classroom and how stories and letters do not make sense without them. We enjoyed reading this book and guessing which punctuation had written a letter to the class.

In the book, So You Want to Be President, we learned tons of information on what it takes to be a president. This book is full of facts about presidents such as the tallest, shortest, heaviest, pets, musical talents and education of many of our presidents. We were reminded when reading this story how all names begin with a capital letter.

With the upcoming election, we had our own mock election. Each student at Hill got to see what it is like to vote for our upcoming president and actually cast their own votes. We liked getting our own "I Voted" sticker, just like we have seen many adults wearing.

During our writing time this week, we chose our favorite story this year and kept it in our writing folders. We are going to work on revising and editing this piece so that we can turn it into a published piece. All of our other stories went home this week. We decorated our writing folders and brought them home to share with our families. Please take some time to look over these writing pieces with your child. My goal was to get them to feel comfortable to write this first 9 weeks and to not worry so much about spelling or conventions. I want them to write from their heart and feel confident about their writing. We will be working on this one story until we get it ready to publish into a book. We know that this a long process and we are excited to become authors.

Sight words this week were: of, some, 

Our traveling Tuesday science rotation focused on energy. We learned that sound is a form of energy and we watched a short BrainPop video to show how sound moves.

We did a science experiment on sound using Mason jars filled with varying levels of water. We discussed which how the highest and lowest pitch and we talked about why.

In Mrs. Clark's rotation we did an experiment about insulators and conductors of heat energy. In Mrs. Hobbs rotation we saw a video segment about the many different kinds of energy (mechanical, chemical, heat, electrical, sound, light) and them we sorted the type of energy with its description and an example.

Our Social Studies focus was on Halloween and Dia de los Muertos. We saw a short video on the history of Halloween and why it is celebrated. Then we used our Math skills to play a game, Big Fat Bat. We also completed a jack-o-lantern glyph, and another jack-o-lantern on the 100 chart. Of course, there was a Math story problem. This one had multiple steps!
The video we saw on Dia de los Muertos explained that this holiday is celebrated with special food, dance, music, and decorations. We made our own papel picado.

Space Case is a fun story by James Marshall. It is about a space alien who comes to Earth on Halloween night. We talked about how this character learned about an unfamiliar culture. 

In addition to all of the Halloween fun, Ms. Rosso came by for a Math Pentathlon lesson. We practiced placing cubes in a standard configuration. This will help us count quickly when we play Calla.

We read two Halloween counting books that were also innovations of familiar classics.

So sorry. This picture just won't rotate. Sounds like a Halloween trick!

In addition to all the fun, Mrs. Phillips came by for a lesson on bullying. We also had a fire drill. 

Week 9

If it seems like we did a lot of reading in language arts this week, you are not mistaken. We are working on the organization trait of our writing unit and took a look at a lot of ways that books are organized. We are still looking at bold beginnings, mighty middles and excellent endings.

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!