More Groundhogs

Our word of the day today was "get". It was a rule follower, because it was a CVC word. Today's word belongs in the "et" family. It was very popular. We wrote the words on the "net of -et". After lunch and recess, we read the story, Gretchen Groundhog Predicts the Weather. We remembered that a noun is a person, place, or thing. Then, Mrs. Myers wrote a list of nouns called proper nouns and a list of nouns called common nouns. Then, we did an "I notice" about the list. We noticed the proper nouns all began with capital letters. Then, we decided all the reasons a noun could be proper. We sorted more words from the story at our seats. Then, we had centertime. We visited our third center of the week. Instead of guided reading today, we read yesterday's language arts story. It was called Groundhog Gets a Say. We filled out the first two columns on a KWL chart - what I know about groundhogs and what I want to learn about groundhogs. Then, after the story, we filled out the "I learned" column. We learned so many neat facts about groundhogs. Ask me to share them with you! After that, we had a math lesson using data. Mrs. Myers gave us the data for the last 14 years of Punxatawney Phil's Groundhog Day results. We graphed the data on a bar graph. We also learned that he has been predicting the season for the last 122 years. We are still working on our true math statements. We also predicted the results for 2009 using this data. We mostly think he will see his shadow, because he usually does. He might not, because there is pattern in the data. In writing workshop today, Mrs. MYers read us the story, Wake Up Groundhog. Mrs. Myers did not read the ending. We talked about all the ways to end a story with a WOW ending. We learned that a WOW ending must be focused. We had two surprise endings, one feelings ending, one sequel ending, and one questions ending. We shared our new endings and then Mrs Myers read us the real ending. Don't forget tomorrow is Jersey Day at Roundtown!