Thursday, February 7, 2008

This morning the kindergarten children wore their masks for the Chinese New Year parade. Madison B. saw her sister. They made different kinds of masks to scare away evil spirits. It was exciting watching the parade and it also felt weird since we weren’t in it this year.

We have been practicing a whole bunch with adjectives. They are words that describe nouns. Everyone had to think of a word that described the person sitting next to him or her. Some of the words we thought of were: fancy, interesting, fashionable, silly, and generous. Ms. Stern does NOT like dull words like: good, nice, fun, cool, or bad. She told us to use “colorful” words that are more interesting than the dull, ordinary ones. There is even a new bulletin board filled with colorful words, where we can borrow a better word to use in our writing. Ms. Stern gave us our papers back from yesterday to check our own work. People got smarter since yesterday because lots of children were able to correct their own work by finding words that weren’t adjectives or by finding dull one and replacing them with more colorful words.

During Reader’s Workshop, Ms. Stern taught us that good readers ask questions before, during, and after reading. Together, we read Tooth Trouble. Ms. Stern wrote our questions on post-its as we thought about the events in the story. We know that good readers ask questions because good readers think about what they are reading. Sometimes it is hard to think of questions while you are reading. The more we do it, the better we get.
We have been sharing some of our Flat Stanleys that have been returned. Flat Erin returned from her trip to California, where she saw cows, artichoke farms, a rodeo, and then got a flat tire! Flat Mikey went to Florida, where he went to visit his cousins. He got splashed at Sea World, learned that Cinderella lives in a castle, saw dolphins, and went to the Kennedy Space Center. Flat Casey went to Orange County, NY. She stayed with her cousin and her aunt. She learned to play the violin, went to work at a doctor’s office, and went to her cousin’s class. Her teacher’s name is Mr. Berger. We looked on Google Earth to see our starting point at school and to see where our Flat friends ended up.