Penguin Week

Our theme this week is penguins. The word of the day today was "me". It was mostly a rule follower, but the "e" was saying his name without any help! We saw that some of the words that rhyme with "me". They had "ea", "ee", and "ey" endings, too. This word was a pronoun. Later in the morning, we had reading workshop and guided reading. Mrs. Myers put us into different groups today to work on something that is difficult for us. We will continue to work in these groups for the rest of the week. We are working on different phonics games. After lunch and recess, we had a new activity. Mrs. Myers put a list of new vocabulary on the overhead. We had to make a "vocabulary chain" which is a true story using each word in order. We worked in groups to write and share the stories. We highlighted the new vocabulary words. Then, Mrs. Myers read the story, The Emperor's Penguin. We listened for the words to see if we used them correctly in our own stories. Then, it was time for writing workshop. We started a new story plan called, A Penguin Adventure. We used our organizer. Today, Mrs. Myers gave us each a story problem for the "action" part of our story. We also met with our "problem buddy" to brainstorm on our action plan. We conferenced with Mrs. Myers. We will continue writing our stories later this week. It was time for new centers. In the games center, we are"fishing" for fish for the adjective penguin, noun penguin, and verb penguin. In the sentence strips center, we are sorting penguins to the consonant digraph iceberg, consonant blend digraph iceberg, and the neither iceberg. In the writing center, we are adding clothespin quotation marks and commas to penguin sentences. We are adding tags to the sentences. In the listening center, we are listening to Cinderella Penguin. We are comparing the story to the regular Cinderella story on a venn diagram. Tomorrow, the art center will open. At the end of the afternoon, we had a new activity called "concept circles". We had a list of four words, and we had to find the word that didn't belong. Then, we had to name the rest of the group. We learned facts about penguin's bodies, the mother penguin's job, the father penguin's job, and the polar habitat. We will share these with you tonight. Also, if you are interested in a "GO GREEN at CENTRAL YORK" shirt, please let Mrs. Myers know this week for an order form. All money benefits the Heffier Foundation.