Friday, March 27, 2009

We’re in the middle of reading Junie B. Jones: Toothless Wonder. It’s a funny story. Darren thinks it’s funny because Junie B. yells a lot and says things that aren’t true. Sometimes she says words wrong, like “flutterflies” instead of butterflies! She also told her mother that the tooth fairy is really a tooth witch! Junie B. is hilarious!

During Reader’s Workshop, Michael got to read all of the books in his book bag. Some children are reading with Ms. Stern to get better at reading and move to a higher level. Kaitlyn moved to a new level, where she is going to concentrate on reading smoothly. Everyone is supposed to be thinking about characters and the traits that they show while they are reading.

We shared a few Flat Stanleys today.

• We learned about Sean’s travels to New Jersey to visit his aunt. He spent time “chilling out.” He also watched the Superbowl, went to school with his cousin, went to work at a bank with his aunt, and he also went to see the Pink Panther 2.
• Daniel went to Canada to see his mom’s old babysitter. The island that Daniel went to doesn’t have many people who live there. You have to take lots of ferries to get from place to place. There are only 80 students at one school and 50 at another. We have more people in first grade than they do in all of their grades there! There are oyster and fish farms in the Pacific Northwest.
• Sophia went to Florida to visit her cousins. The real Sophia went to visit her cousins and brought in a bunch of artifacts from the sea. We got to examine a horseshoe crab, conch egg pouches, sand dollar, fossilized conch, and a sea urchin.
  
  At P.E. we played a game called “Surprise.” We got into groups and got to name our teams. Nolan, Sammy, Joshua, Anthony, and Gianluca were called the Thunderbolts. They passed the ball around in a pattern. After one ball is being used, a second ball is added. When the coach calls “SURPRISE,” the teammates have to line up behind the person holding the ball. Nolan thought it started off easy and then got trickier.
  
  Today we got a chance to look through our Mem writing, read it all, and choose a piece to make sure we included a strong beginning. We learned that writing a good beginning is a challenge, even for Mem. Our goal is to “hook” our readers and get them to want to read more. Anthony found that most of his stories had a strong beginning. Sophia thought most of hers did, too.
  
  We had a contest in the class. Mrs. Piteo gave us our class decorations from the Dance Festival. Ms. Stern asked us to pick a number 1-20 to see who would get to keep them. Isabella guessed correct first and Sophia guessed the number the second time. Isabella wants to hang hers on her dresser in her bedroom.
  
  We’ve done a lot of discovering about our mealworms this week. We now believe that the mealworms turn into the pupae and the pupae become beetles! Yesterday we looked closely at how they change over time. We noticed that the features become darker and the body gets more round. The eyes are the first parts that we can see. Next week we will learn more about the mealworms and how they change.