Zoo Week

Our theme this week is zoo. We are excited to visit Zoo America on Thursday. To begin our day, we handprinted our t-shirts to look like an alligator, a lion, and a snake. We are going to wear our zoo shirts on Thursday for the field trip. We really want to thank Mrs. Bashada, Mrs. Donnor, Mrs. Guadagnino, Mrs. Kurland for helping us paint our shirts. They will come home tomorrow when they are dry! Our word of the day today was "from". It was rule breaker, because the "o" said the sound of "short u". It had a popular word family -um, but it didn't look like the word "from". We had library and lunch and recess. Then, we had a mixed up afternoon. Mrs. Myers was observed by new first grade teachers and reading specialist in the district, so we changed our afternoon routine. We started with writing workshop. Today we practiced for the district writing assessment. We wrote a story about a time with our friends. Mrs. Myers is going to score the story in the areas of focus, content, organization, and proofreading. You can score up to four points for each area. On Wednesday, we will have the real district writing assessment. Then, we heard our afternoon story. We read the story My School's a Zoo. It was funny! We compared the school in the story to our own school on a venn diagram. A venn diagram is two circles that connect in the center. The center shows things that are the same. The outside of the circles show things that are different. Then, it was time for reading workshop and guided reading. This is were we had all of our visitors observing. It was crazy with all those people watching. At the end of the day we went to centers. We have zoo centers this week. At the games centers, we are matching circus cars to animals using the mixed up word of the day words. At the magnetic letters, we are practicing the -ay, -ar, and -ig word families on trains. Then we are using the words in three sentences. In the writing center, we pick a story pop for each area - characters, setting, and problem. Then we write a story. In the sentence strips center, we are putting animals in alphabetical order. It was a busy, but fun day! Tomorrow we will learn about the animals we will see at the zoo.