Happy St. Patrick's Day

Happy St. Patrick's Day. We were all wearing green today! HOORAY! We started our day with a great leprechaun hunt. Lucky O'Sullivan, a leprechaun, visited our classroom. He led us on a treasure hunt of clues. We looked all around our classroom for him, and we even had to go see Mrs. Howard. Finally, Ryan discovered the last clue and the treasure! Although we didn't catch Lucky, he left us some golden Irish candy! We were so excited and wound up! Then, it was back to learning. Our word of the day today was "great". It was a rule breaker, because the "ea" vowel pair did not say the correct sound. It said the sound of "long a". We learned that the word "great" was an adjective. It has a homonym - grate, which is a verb. We also learned that the "ate" family looks like -ate, -eight, or -ait. After recess, we had a little more leprechaun trouble. Then, we had reading workshop time. At game time, we did an independent making words activity. We will continue this activity tomorrow. Mrs. Myers is almost finished reading with us one at a time. After lunch and recess, Mrs. Myers had us brainstorm everything we thought we knew about St. Patrick's Day holiday. We knew it was an Irish holiday with leprechauns, and it had something to do with St. Patrick, but most of us didn't know who he was. So, we read the story, Patrick, Patron Saint of Ireland. We learned lots of facts about the life of St. Patrick. After the story, we listed the facts on a giant shamrock. We also learned that St. Patrick's Day is celebrated on the day St. Patrick died over 1,600 years ago. There was nothing about leprechauns in the story!!! We were so surprised. Ask me to share some facts about St. Patrick tonight. Then, it was time for centers. We visited our second center today. After centers, we had math. In math today, we learned about the nickel and the penny. First, we brainstormed a list of what we already knew about the penny. Then, Mrs. Myers read the Penny story. We learned a few more facts and added them to our list. We also looked at five different real pennies to see the attributes . Then, we read the Nickel story and looked at 5 different nickels. Four were old nickels, but one was the new nickel. We saw the changes made to the nickel after 2005. We practiced counting by 1's and 5's. Then, we practiced ordering coins from the "most expensive" to the "least expensive". We counted nickels and pennies in our piggy bank. We can practiced counting pennies and nickels at home, too. In writing workshop, we went to Mrs. Lauber's class. We talked about the word "went" as a boring verb. Next, we got in groups and brainstormed a list of words that could replace "went" . Before recess, each group shared the top 3 from their list. We will continue this activity tomorrow. We ended the day with phys. ed. It was a fun day!