Pumpkin Time

Our theme this week is pumpkins! We are excited that Halloween is right around the corner! Our word of the day today was "we". It was a pronoun. It was also a homonym to the words "wee" and "wii". This word was half a rule breaker and a rule follower. The "e" in "we" says his name, but there is no magic vowel. It does happen in these words - we, be, he, she, me. This morning, we browsed at the Book Fair. Please check my mail today to see the books I might like to purchase. Tomorrow will be buying day. We can also buy books tomorrow evening! In math today, we practiced addition dominos. We read the story, Domino Addition, too. Mrs. Myers taught us how to write our addition sentences across and up and down. On the up and down sentence, we don't use a equal's sign. It 's called an equal's line. We also learned that you can change the order of the numbers in an addition sentence and still get the same sum. It 's called the commutative property. After lunch and recess, we went to Mrs. Lauber's room. Mrs. Myers read the story The Stubborn Pumpkin. It was like the story The Enormous Watermelon, we read during watermelon week. We acted out a retelling of the story in groups. It was funny! We had character cards and narrators for each group. Then, it was time for new pumpkin centers. In games center, we sorted short and long u pictures on pumpkins. In the writing center, we drew a jack-o-lantern. Then, we described it so Mrs. Myers could guess what it looked like, without looking at our picture first! In the poetry center, we read the poem, The Pumpkin on the Vine. We practiced reading it. Then we made a personal connection to the poem. In the listening center, we heard the story, Too Many Pumpkins. We drew and wrote about our favorite part. Art center opens tomorrow! In writing workshop today, we learned to start our story with a "grab the reader" beginning. We listened to the beginning of three stories. We learned to use a descriptive setting or tell something important to get our reader excited about the story. Then, we tried it out! We will continue to learn new ways to start our stories tomorrow.