We Love to Read (and Write) "Snow" Much!

We are studying the difference between realism and fantasy. We read the book "The Snowman" by Raymond Briggs. Next, we watched the video of the same name. Guess what? There are no words! You have to make up the story in your head. We wrote our own adventures with a snowman. Look for them to come home soon.

Reading Celebration!

Today was the January Reading Celebration, "We Love To Read 'Snow' Much". We had a "Snow Store" to purchase prizes with our reading minutes. Everyone got to "buy" a prize, but we went in order of who had the most minutes. There were some great snowman gifts!

Everyone also got a book called "The Snowy Day" by Ezra Jack Keats. (After the contest, we all read it together.)
The top reader was Emma with 1250 minutes. Way to go!
The second place reader was Elliot with 1205 minutes. Way to read!
Here is our entire class of winning readers with the items they purchased with their January reading minutes. Reading is so much fun!
This afternoon we had a very unusual assembly. Look how carefully we are watching and listening.
We had a man who "played" glasses. He called the "glass harps". We were able to recognize the tunes he created.
Have a great weekend. Our February Reading Contest, " 'Dog-gone' Good Readers" will begin on Monday with the minutes you read this weekend. (You will be able to rescue stuffed dogs from Mrs. O'Brien's Puppy Pound with your reading minutes!)

Penguin Centers

I have been reading the children books about penguins. We read fiction books about penguins for fun (our favorite series is about "Tacky the Penguin" by Helen Lester) and non-fiction books that are filled with penguin facts.

Here are our Penguin Centers:

The Old Lady who swallowed penguin words. (A little finger must have erased the "a" on the sentence!)
"I'm a Little Penguin" (sung to the tune of "I'm a Little Teapot") gives us changing verbs (dive, slide, jump, swim...) to describe penguin movement.
Our favorite word is singing about Tacky to the tune of "Bingo"!
This chart is a song called "All the Penguins" to the tune of "Clementine." (You can click on the picture to enlarge it so your child can sing it to you.)
Here is "The Twelve Different Penguins" sung to the tune of "The Twelve Days of Christmas".
We all wrote a sentence about Tacky. (Aren't these GREAT!!!???)
We moved around the letters in "Snow loving penguins" to find out how many words we could create.
Don't forget that tomorrow is the Reading Celebration! I will have a "Snow Store" where students can use their reading minutes to buy snowman prizes (and everyone will receive a book about snow). (Sneak Preview: Next week we begin the February Reading Contest "Dog-gone Good Readers"! Can't wait!)

Science and Math

We are continuing our study of organisms by watching the growth of our seeds. These seeds were planted on January 22. We observed them on January 25 and today (January 27). Here are the results:

The pinto beans seem to be sprouting the quickest.
The pumpkin seeds seem to be sprouting the slowest. There are no sprouts yet.
One pea plant has sprouted.
Two sunflower seeds have sprouted.
The table with the pinto beans actually got to record the growth of the plant. Some of the plants have grown as much as 5 inches in 6 days!

We also have a control group of plants: Mrs. O'Brien planted one of each seed. Her results were the same as the students' plants.

Ask your child to tell you what could make these results incorrect. (Examples we came up with were: it was too cold, too hot, too much water, not enough water, not enough air, not enough nutrients in the soil...)
In math, we are continuing to work with money. Today we played a fun game where Mrs. O'Brien gave each table a pile of mixed up (plastic) money.
The tables had to work together to see how quickly they could sort out the pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters.
It was an exciting time as we looked carefully at the money to see the differences in size and color.
We are doing a great job of learning the names and values of money, and of counting our money.

We decided that counting pennies is like counting by ones, counting nickels is like counting by fives and counting dimes is like counting by tens. We have a special chant for counting quarters: 25-50-75-100!

We use our real money in our ziplock bags for our worksheets. We can move the money into the circle drawn on the bag without opening the bag so no money gets lost.

We made different combinations that added up to 25 cents and 50 cents today.

Ian brought in a half dollar, a golden dollar coin and a silver dollar coin. These dollar coins are a little larger than a quarter. The half dollar is the largest coin.

Can your child put the coins in money order?

(Penny, nickel, dime, quarter, fifty cent piece, silver/golden dollar)

Can your child put the coins in size order?

(dime, penny, nickel, quarter, silver/golden dollar/fifty cent piece)

Can your child count a mixture of coins by putting them in order (largest amount to smallest amount) and "count on"?

Counselors, Terrariums and Aquariums... oh, my!

Today, our counselor, Mrs. Kolander, taught a very interesting lesson on "bullying". Ask your child about it!
Continuing our Science unit on organisms, we created terrariums. This is a woodland terrarium. "Terra" means earth. The terrarium provides light, water, air and nutrients.
This is our aquarium. "Aqua" mean water. This is a freshwater aquarium. It contains rocks, plants, guppies and snails. The snails help keep the water clean. This aquarium provides water, light, air and nutrients for the plants and animals.
We carefully observed our aquariums or terrariums.
We shared out with all the details we saw, and were careful to draw them in our Science journals.
We noticed many interesting items in our enclosed environments.
We drew with as much detail as possible, and added correct colors.
We continued to look for details throughout our work.
We noticed things we would not have seen if we had only looked for a little while.
We also discussed the parts of a snail and a guppy.
Bet you can't wait to see all this excellent work!

(PS: Did you watch the video of our assembly on yesterday's blog? Be sure and go back to view it if you didn't!)