Good Bye!

Another friend is moving and today is his last day with us. We are so going to miss this kind, clever, energetic, compassionate young man!

Preparing For Publication

We are publishing narratives. First we selected a piece to revise for publication and since then have been busy revising. We have written powerful beginnings and modified our endings to include dialogue and feeling. A huge part has been ensuring our stories are "easy to read." To do this we used a checklist (picture provided below) to make sure our writing is neat enough to read, has lots of letters for  each word, includes words from the word wall, has spaces between words, includes lowercase letters where appropriate, and includes uppercase letters at the beginning of each sentence. Next week, as part of our writing celebration, we will be reading them to a third/fourth grade partner!

Guest Readers

Thank you to all the parents who have come to share their favorite stories with us! There is still time if you want in!!!! :)

Memorial Day Celebration

Left & Right

Today we used our hands to learn about right and left while practicing the language of location and direction. We first determined our right and left and then played a whole class game that got us moving. I called out a direction for students to follow. Here are some examples:

Put your left hand behind your back.

Put your right hand above your head.

We then traced our hands and labeled them right and left. Our activities helped us learn and apply the following skills and concepts:

Use the directional words left and right to describe movement

Describe the location of one object relative to another object using words such as in, out over, under, above, below, beside, between, next to, across from, behind, in front of, near and far

Twins!

Drive For Education

Thank you to Mrs. Hayes who wrote and was awarded a grant from Berlin City to buy books for our school. We are going to use the money to purchase multiple copies of "just-right-books" to use during reading workshop.

Exploring Characters Feelings

Our learning intention today was: "I can think about the characters feelings in a story." We began as a whole group talking about feelings, and named differernt feelings with a special feelings chart. We then talked about thinking about characters feelings when reading by following these steps:

Reading the book

Stopping periodically to think about how the character feels

Asking ourselves how we would feel if we were the character.

Before sending readers out on their own I read a familiar story book - "Wemberly Worried" by Kevin Henkes. As I read out loud I talked out loud and referred to the feelings chart to connect with what the character was feeling . . . "I'm going to think about how this might make the character feel by asking myself:"

'How would I feel if I was the character?'

'Well if this happened to me I would feel . . . '

Then I asked the kids to tell me what they noticed me doing. "Did you see how I stopped and thought about how my character feels by asking myself, 'How would I feel if I was the character?'

Kids then wrote how they would feel if they were Wemberly.

Student Requests

I love that my kids "request" that I put their creations, projects and work on the blog. The boy who made this block structure asked me to put it on the blog the day before yesterday. I forgot! When he came to school today, he let me know that he and his father had looked for it and it wasn't there, so could I "please make sure to put it on tonight." :)

Character Traits

We are getting to know characters in books in meaningful ways by discussing the character traits of some of our favorite characters. Today we read "Chrysanthemum" by Kevin Henkes and then created a list of words that would best describe the main character, Chrysanthemum. Then each student wrote the trait they thought best described her and wrote it on a post-it for our classroom anchor chart.

Unifix Cube Measuring

This lesson focused on estimating and then measuring with Unifix cubes that were grouped in 10's. We recorded our estimates and actual measurements on the recording sheet shown below. This helped us build our math muscles as we practiced estimating length using a benchmark of 10 Unifix cubes, measuring with nonstandard units, counting quantities to 30 and beyond, and recording and comparing results.