Sunday, March 28, 2010

Eric Carle Videos

Happy Eric Carle Day!!! Here's a quick look into our fun relay game!


Eric Carle Celebration Day!

We had a great culminating celebration of our beloved author, Eric Carle! Students were invited to dress as their favorite Eric Carle character. We rotated through different fun centers. We started our day by playing Eric Carle bingo, with all of his book titles and enjoyed pancakes too! Then we played a game on the "smart board" about different animals. At our third center, we read the book Mr. Seahorse, by Eric Carle and learned a lot about different daddy animals that help take care of their eggs and babies. Students used colored tissue paper strips to make their seahorse art. Lastly, students went outside to play a Very Hungry Caterpillar relay game. They had a BLAST!! Each student raced another student in the first relay game and then we played again with partners. We enjoyed green cupcakes (Thank you Mariah's mom) in the shape of The Very Hungry Caterpillar. After lunch, we finished up some other crafts, including making Eric Carle bookmarks, little hermit crabs from pasta shells, caterpillar necklaces, and click beetles that really click! Did your child come home and take a nap that day? It was a VERY BUSY day!!

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Leprechauns on the Loose!

We celebrated St. Patrick's Day today. Students set up the leprechaun traps that they made for homework. While we were out for lunch, the leprechaun or leprechauns made a HUGE mess in our class. They tripped our traps and left some gold candy and coins behind, but no luck in catching a real leprechaun! A secret message was left behind.
The students were so surprised and shocked! (Only 1 or 2 who were truly terrified, and we calmed them down!)
Making news!!

Monday, March 15, 2010

The Very Busy Authors!


As we have been studying Eric Carle, students have learned many new writing techniques to add to their writing strategies. For example, the have learned to "hook" the reader with a lead sentence such as, "Have you ever read the book The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle?" They have included their favorite part, connections, and began working on detailed retellings. In the midst of all of this work, we can't help but have a little...well a lot of fun too! After reading The Very Busy Spider and retelling it with prop pieces, we decided to make our very own spider web. As we spun the web, we retold the story page by page. Then after the web was made, we took turns being the fly caught in the web!

Shapin' up in Math


We have been studying 2-D and 3-D shapes in math. We've talked about the attributes of each shape, such as a rhombus has 4 equal sides and a square and a rectangle are similar because they both have 4 corners. We've examined shapes in real world objects, such as a fire truck is a rectangular prism and a tootsie pop is a sphere. Here you see students working together in pairs to fill hexagons several different ways! Great teamwork and great strategies!

We're going to the zoo!

We had such a great time at the zoo! From the bus ride on the way to the zoo, to seeing the animals, learning from the zookeepers, and taking a nap on the way home! Thank you to all of our wonderful chaperones!