Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Our theme this week is Easter. We had to do the spring dance at morning meeting today, because we want spring weather to return and stay! Our word of the day today is "boy". It was a rule follower, because the "oy" sound is a vowel diphthong. This word was a noun. We know the pronouns he and his can replace the word boy. We wrote some words that belong in the -oy family. We also discussed how "oi" makes the same sound as "oy". After recess, we had reading workshop. Mrs. Myers read with two groups. At 11:00, we got a Scholastic News and took a sound and reading check. If we didn't finish today, we will finish tomorrow. After lunch, we met with Mrs. Lauber's class to hear the story, Easter, by Gail Gibbons. It was nonfiction, but it did not have photographs, a table of contents, an index, or a glossary. It did tell us facts, though. Before the story, we wrote down three facts we already knew about spring. After the story, we wrote down three facts we learned from the story. We shared our facts. Next, we had centertime. In the games center this week, we are sorting and writing consonant digraph sounds. In the writing center, we are choosing a noun picture in a magazine. Then, we are describing it with adjectives, writing a verb that matches the noun, and adding two adverbs. At the end, we write a descriptive sentences and share it with our group while they visualize the sentence. Last, we show them the picture and see if we described it well! At the overhead center, we are sorting nouns, verbs, and adjectives and using them in sentences. The last center is the listening center. We heard the story, The Easter Bunny is Missing. We are mapping the problem, events, and solution as we listen. The art center this week is fun! We are making a crayon resist Easter egg. After centers, we had writing workshop time. Today we were listening to a story with lots of style. We brainstormed that a story has style if you add similes, adjectives, adverbs, onomatopoeia, and strong (show not tell) verbs. During the story, The Great Easter Egg Hunt, we heard all of these, except similes. The strong verbs were the best, though! Then it was time for music. Macy B. got the golden award at music class, because she had such great behavior. After recess, it was math time. It was so much fun today, because we did three estimation activities. First, we estimated Easter eggs in the jar. There were 20. Lots of us estimated correctly. Next, we estimated jelly beans. There were 88 in the jar. This was harder, but we did pretty well, because we knew it had to be between 60 - 100 from comparing before the estimation. The last estimation was Easter Bunny tails (cotton balls). The tails were bigger than the jelly beans, but smaller than the Easter eggs. There were 41 in the jar. Thomas and Mrs. Myers had it perfect. We all did well, because we knew there had to be between 35 - 45 in the jar from our comparing before we estimated. We talked about all the things we estimate each day in real life. We are going to be on the lookout at home for more things we have to estimate in the kitchen or the bathroom. Dawson said that we have to estimate when we are going to run out of toilet paper and Elle said that we have to estimate how much room we have on a line before we write a word, or it might not fit. We also would like to make an estimation jar for our families. It is so much fun! What a day! We were really noisy, but we did learn a lot! Tomorrow, we will try to use our self control all day long!