I See. I Think. I Wonder.

Valentine's Day in Room 408

We had a fun afternoon of Valentine activities. We started by doing a candy hearts math activity. Bennett held the bag while we chose three small packages of candy hearts.

Next, we sorted our candy hearts by color and recorded the data.

We used our "make tens" strategies to add the data.

Next, we graphed the data.

We also had fun making the Valentine crafts that Kasten's family sent in.

Finally, we got to hand out our Valentines.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Friendship Day

On the morning of Valentine's Day LEADS families celebrated Friendship Day.

We mixed and mingled with fellow LEADS students. We played games in Mrs. Zoll's room, did arts & crafts in our classroom, and had fun with building activities down in Mrs. Oss' & Mrs. Heins' rooms.

Here is a video of Friendship Day in the arts & crafts room!

Here is a video of Friendship Day in the building rooms and in 4K!

Publishing

This month we spread out all our writing and chose a personal narrative story from our writing workshop folders. We chose a piece that we could do more work with to make it even better.

We exploded moments in our stories just like the authors did in The Girl on the High Diving Horse and Crab Moon.

After we exploded the most exciting moment in our story, we made sure our stories made sense. We also read our stories to each other and added parts to make sure any readers' questions were answered.

We also created beginnings that hooked our readers, and endings that let our readers go gently.

When we were done we got the typed copy of our story and we were ready to illustrate.

In the past few weeks we have illustrated our books, designed endpapers, created titles that make others want to read our books, and added blurbs on the back. If you want to read our books, you'll need to come to the Exploration Celebration on April 20th!

Little House in the Big Woods

We started reading the Little House series. The first book is Little House in the Big Woods.

I love this series because it provides so many opportunities for visualizing, good use of author's style from a first grader's perspective, and of course, inquiry. I try to "prime the pump" before each chapter to get Room 408 thinking about what we will discover. For example, we viewed this photo to predict what we think it is and what use it has. We discussed drawing diagrams, labeling and writing, and explained our thinking in our Think Books.

The kids came up with so many great predictions--from yo-yos to dream catchers to eggs!

When we read the chapter about pig butchering and using every part of the animal for a purpose, you can see their gears grinding and realization dawning when they hear about how Laura and Mary play with the pig's bladder like a ball or balloon--which was the object in the observation picture!

These books are also great examples of how things were made and how people lived off the land before you could just show up at the store and buy what you needed. For example, one of the favorite things we did so far was make butter.