Charlotte's Cousins

We have been reading Charlotte's Web during our snack time/read aloud time.  How can you not fall in love with the story of Fern, Charlotte, and Wilbur?

We are at the chapter where Charlotte tells stories of her cousins and their remarkable abilities.  When she told Wilbur of her cousin who caught and ate a fish, Samuel immediately thought of a connection from a book he read about spiders during Reading Workshop.

Here is a video of a spider that uses bubbles of air to eat his prey!

Charlotte also talks about her cousins, the aeronauts. Here is a video about that kind of spider, as well!

Since we're watching spiders, here is a cool video I found about a spider spinning a web. What are you wondering about these spiders?

Pilgrim & Wampanoag Inquiry

We have been researching the history of Thanksgiving.  We have been receiving letters from a Pilgrim girl and a Wampanoag boy each week.  You can see these letters by clicking here or on the picture below.

Everyone who travels on a far journey is considered a "pilgrim."  

We learned about the voyage on the Mayflower through books and virtual tours (click here or on the image below).

We looked closely at the cutaway of the Mayflower ship for clues...

...and tried to match up what we saw with this great interactive Mayflower ship tour by clicking here or on the image below.

We also investigated the layout of the Wampanoag homesite.

We used plimoth.org to view Wampanoag homesites (click here or on the image below to check it out).

We took a virtual field trip on our Google Earth app to visit the Plimoth Plantation and see the Wampanoag homesite as well as the Pilgrim village.

We were able to see a lot of the scenery by enabling the "panoramio" photos within Google Earth.

For this these great resources, click on the links below.  Enjoy!

Scholastic First Thanksgiving resources

Plimoth Plantation resources

Earthworms and Ice Cream

As the Reading Committee was putting books and magazines away, an interesting fact caught their attention.  They read that the longest earthworm was 22 FEET LONG!  We needed to see how long this was so we laid out 22 rulers in the hallway.

We checked and then double-checked like mathematicians.  That is one LOOOOOOONG earthworm!

We also traded in ten of our BEAK awards for an ice cream party!

Yummy!  Thanks for being a great class!

Doubles, Doubles

For a few days we have been learning and discussing doubles facts.  We searched for patterns on these doubles ten frames:

We also read the Chinese folktale called Two of Everything.

It is the story of finding a magic pot that doubles whatever is put into it.  However, the doubles lead them to troubles!

We put our own numbers into a magic pot and practiced our doubles facts by singing along with this video:

Which is your favorite doubles fact?

Domino Game

Today we practiced the domino game that Kenehsaeh taught to us yesterday.

We had lots of fun collaborating with partners to play dominoes!

October Learning Mural Day

Today is our Learning Mural Day.  We reflected on all the learning we did in October and brainstormed a list.

We picked a topic to represent with partners on our learning mural and got right to work!

Here is the finished product.  We could hardly fit it all in!

Growing as Writers

We have reached a bend in our first Writing Workshop unit...next we will take our focus on small moment stories and make them even better by making our small moment stories come alive.  To celebrate the end of the first part of our unit, we did a gallery walk for our sharing time today and compared our current writing with our very first piece of writing from back in early September.  It was exciting to see how much our brains have grown in only two short months!

Keep up the great work, Room 408!