Writing Opinions

We are starting a new unit in Writing Workshop about opinion writing.
Our morning message got us discussing whether we liked tacos or pizza best and why.

As we tried to convince each other if pizza or tacos was better, kids kept changing their opinions based on other people's reasons.  A great example of the power of persuasion!
During Writing Workshop we began by discussing how a judge awards a first prize and gives reasons to convince others about his/her decision.
Kenley shared her knowledge about dog shows.

I shared a "dog" collection with Room 408 and we all wrote about which one we liked best and why.

Tomorrow we will write our opinions about our own personal collections!

Gavin's New Puppy

Gavin got a new puppy and brought him in to share.

Congratulations on your new puppy, Gavin!

Human Sundials

We hadn't started our Sound & Light inquiry yet, but as I looked across the weather in the next month, there wasn't a sunny day in sight except for Friday.
We needed a sunny day for our Human Sundial experiment, so I needed to take advantage of the weather!
Several times throughout the day we headed outside and recorded information about our shadows and the position of the sun in the sky.

 We traced each other's shadows.

 We noticed where the sun was in the sky with relation to the school.

 We measured how many fists high in the sky the sun was.

 Finally, we measured the length of our shadows.

We were surprised by the changes in our shadows when we headed out two hours later!

 Then we traced and recorded our information again.

The next time we went out was around noon.  We thought it was so funny that our shadows were so short and fat!
It was so much fun to record our shadows!

Shapes

We have started studying 2D and 3D shapes.
We have been discussing properties of shapes such as faces, edges, and vertices.  We have created shapes on geoboards, practiced drawing shapes, and played guessing games about hidden shapes.

We have also focused on how smaller shapes can be put together to make larger shapes.  We filled in a large hexagon with smaller shapes and recorded how many of each shape it took.

We created so many different and creative ways!

Deep Thinking

We are starting a new Reading Workshop unit on thinking deeply while we read.
We started our unit out by reading Ira Sleeps Over, a book that I had when I was a child.

We all have different schema (background knowledge) so we all make different connections to the story.  We illustrated these connections after reading the book.

Throughout our unit, we have thought deeply while reading books such as Owl Moon and My Father's Dragon.

As we read these books, we found we were making predictions, predicting, noticing powerful feelings, visualizing, and inferring.

Hunting for -er

We have been studying r-controlled vowels.  One of our favorite activities is a word hunt that contains the vowel pattern of the week.

 It seems like -er is everywhere!

Math with Mrs. Moeller

As a special reward, we went to the math room and worked with Mrs. Moeller.


We had such a great time. Thank you, Mrs. Moeller!

Highway Department Field Trip

We went  on a field trip to the Shawano Highway Department and learned about careers.

Our "Field Trip" to Antarctica

This week we're going on an imaginary field trip to Antarctica.  We found Antarctica on the globe.

We made measuring tapes and recorded our heights in order to figure out what size snow suit we need.

We watched a video about Antarctica so we'd know what to expect.

We read a poem about Rockhopper penguins and listened for important information.

We found out that Rockhopper penguins are about 18 inches tall.  We measured out string to record the height of the Rockhopper penguin.

We compared Rockhopper penguin heights to our own heights.

We saw a video about Rockhoppers.  They are so cute!

The next day we did research on King penguins.  We found out that they are about 36 inches tall.

 They were pretty tall!

We watched a video about King penguins.

We learned a lot about Antarctica, but we're glad it's spring in Wisconsin!