Informative Writing...Published!

We finished our informative writing pieces this week and published them using one of my favorite new iPad apps called Little Bird Tales. Click on the picture of each student below to watch listen to the stories!

 

 

Math Bingo

Our plan for the afternoon was to go on an insect hunt but crazy April weather in Indiana changed that. Instead we completed an Eric Carle writing we didn't get a chance to do last week and played a couple rounds of number bingo. I don't think the class cared too much about the change! They had so much fun!

Growing, Growing!

About a week ago we put a wet paper towel and two bean seeds in a baggie out in the hallway to watch grow. After several days of no activity we finally started to see seeds sprouting and several leaves coming out as well!

Butterfly Observation Journal...Day 1

Today we illustrated our first observation of our caterpillars. Some of the discussion during our observation was that the caterpillars were crawling up the side, one was on the lid, looking for the eyes, how many caterpillars were in the jar, colors we saw and how big they were! We are excited to watch them grow and change!

Informational Writing Continued...

Today we began writing our ideas that we read in our books down on a graphic organizer. Each student took their book and wrote down the topic and three facts. After writing each part, they were to illustrate to go along with their writing. Next, we will take the graphic organizer idea page and transfer to writing those ideas into sentences.

Informational Writing

We have been working on writing informational writing pieces as a class. We wrote on several different topics involving how to plant a garden, tools used in a garden and animals found in a garden. This week, the class is writing their own piece. I checked out several animal, insect and plant books from our school library. We first looked through all of the books and the students found at least three they would love to learn more about. After going through all of the books, I put them out on the chalkboard and called students up one at a time to pick one of their favorite choices. Once every student had a book, we broke up into partners and practiced one of our three ways to read a book...read the pictures! We then took the books home and read the words with our family before coming back the next day to begin our writing!

Our Caterpillars Arrived!

We have been learning about many bugs and insects. One of our favorites are caterpillars and butterflies! Thanks to our wonderful PAC (parent advisory council) we were able to purchase FIVE live caterpillars to watch grow and transform into beautiful painted lady butterflies. On our first day, we each got to hold the jar of caterpillars and look at them up close. They were not moving very much and were teeny tiny! We know they will get bigger and are excited to watch them grow!

Poem of the Week--My Apple

Retelling The Very Hungry Caterpillar

During our week long study of Eric Carle and several of his books we practiced retelling one of his most famous books The Very Hungry Caterpillar. We used pictures from the story and organized our retelling by using sentence strips with the days of the week to place each picture/part of the story. After finishing putting the pictures in the correct order we retold the story as a class using our pictures.

Daily 5 Math!

We have a few new additions to our Daily 5 Math choices. At Math with Someone the partner duo rolls a dice and adds that many cubes to their pile. Once they reach a group of ten they attach their cubes together. Before each roll they have to say how many cubes they have and then add the number of cubes they roll on the dice. The first partner to reach 20 cubes wins!


A new "Number Work" choice is to fill in the missing numbers to a hundreds chart. They can use a completed hundreds chart sheet to help guide them if needed!


One of the new choices at "Math by Myself" is to practice drawing shapes. The specific shapes I will be testing the students on is the circle, square, rectangle, triangle and hexagon. I included the oval, diamond, star and heart for extra practice once the first five are mastered.

 

Another "Math with Someone" choice has the group practicing recognizing numbers 1-20 and drawing the correct amount of tens and ones to go with the number.