Favorite Eric Carle Characters!

To finish off our author study, we each took a blank piece of white paper and drew our favorite character(s) from one of the Eric Carle books we read this week. We then sat in a circle and shared our illustrations and said why that specific character was our favorite. What a fun week studying such a unique and wonderful author!

Rhythm Sticks Fun!

During our music and movement time today, we took out our rhythm sticks and had a little fun dancing along to the music! Our sticks tap high and our sticks tap low =).

Shape Drawings!

I introduced a new activity during daily five math stations for math with someone called "Shape Drawings". The students are to use the provided three dimensional shapes and create a drawing out of them. They are encouraged to relate the shapes to objects found in real life that resemble those shapes. I have them working in partners to help provide time to share ideas with one another. Below are pictures of the students at this station, as well as a few examples of completed papers.

60 Seconds=1 LONG minute!

After reading The Grouchy Ladybug, where the ladybug flies around all day picking fights with animals much larger than the herself. It takes her an hour to fly in between each animal. We decided to see how long it would feel doing something straight for an entire minute. We compared it to the ladybug flying around for an hour at a time. We thought of four different things to do as many times as we could in a minute. It turns out a minute feels a lot longer than we thought it would!

  

How many times can you touch your toes in one minute??

How many times can you say your ABC's in one minute??

How many jumping jacks can you do in one minute??

More Caterpillars!

On Monday, we looked at five different pictures of very different caterpillars and came up with interesting words to describe them. Today, we wrote a sentence "Caterpillars are _____." Each student picked their favorite describing word that was used for the caterpillars and finished the sentence. We then turned our sentences into caterpillars!

Retell a Familiar Story

For our first mini-lesson during daily five/cafe today, we practiced one of the first strategies we learned, "retell a familiar story". I handed each student a picture from Eric Carle's book The Very Hungry Caterpillar. While reading through the story, we practiced retelling it with each picture. Each student brought their picture up and placed it in the pocket chart when we said their part of the story. We also discussed how using these pictures to practice retelling also used another strategy "use pictures to tell a story". We were excited to practice a few of our older strategies in working with comprehension.

I'm sooo hungry....

After reading Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar, we completed a writing activity. We wrote sentences pretending to be a very hungry caterpillar eating our favorite food! We are enjoying our study about Eric Carle and learning how he uses the different animals, insects and plants in his books. We have been able to use several of our Daily Five/Cafe strategies when reading his books too!

I'm so hungry I could eat pizza.

I'm so hungry I could eat chocolate cake.

I'm so hungry I could eat apples.

I'm so hungry I could eat bananas.

I'm so hungry I could eat cheese burgers.

I'm so hungry I could eat chocolate cake.

I'm so hungry I could eat ice cream.

I'm so hungry I could eat cherries.

I'm so hungry I could eat pizza.

I'm so hungry I could eat pizza.

I'm so hungry I could eat apples.

I'm so hungry I could eat apples.

I'm so hungry I could eat spaghetti.

I'm so hungry I could eat apples.

I'm so hungry I could eat pears.

I'm so hungry I could eat pizza.

I'm so hungry I could eat watermellon.

I'm so hungry I could eat chocolate pizza.

I'm so hungry I could eat chocolate cake.

Caterpillars

Today, we looked at five different pictures of five very different caterpillars. Using the idea of our CAFE strategy "tune in to interesting words" from last week, we described each of these caterpillars.

Here is a list of words we came up with:

• colorful
• ticklish
• spots
• stripes
• squishy
• spiky
• pokey
• furry
• slimy
• round
• pointy
• shiny
• spidery
• snakey
• sharp
• stringy
• scary
• smooth
• fuzzy



Eric Carle Author Study

This week we are doing an author study on Eric Carle. We are reading as many of his books as we can. We will also be completing several activities with a few of his books. Today, we started off by watching two video clips. One is Eric Carle being interviewed and talking about writing and illustrating his book The Very Hungry Caterpillar. After watching this video, we watched a second one where his story comes to life in an animated version of his story. Below are the two videos we watched in class.