Wednesday, January 6, 2010

We are 4 marbles away from having our first Charlie Caps party! We’ve earned 46 already. Ms. Stern let us brainstorm what kind of party we want to have. There were lots of ideas. We voted using tally marks and decided to have a cozy day by wearing our pajamas and watching a movie with snacks like popcorn and hot chocolate. We can’t wait to earn those marbles!!!

Ms. Stern read us a book called Strega Nona. Strega Nona means grandma witch. She gets a helper named Big Anthony. She tells him not to touch her magic pasta pot. Once she went away, he thought it was his chance to use it. He tried saying her magic spell. It worked! Lots and lots of pasta came out of the pasta pot. Big Anthony tried to say the spell to make it stop. Unfortunately, he hadn’t seen Strega Nona blow 3 kisses after saying the spell so the pasta kept coming. The people in the town got very angry. Strega Nona came back just in time. Everyone wanted to punish Big Anthony by tying him up. Strega Nona thought the punishment should fit the crime so Big Anthony had to eat up all of the spaghetti by himself. After we read the story we thought of words that described the main characters. Some of the words that we came up with were: magical, smart, calm, and fair. Big Anthony was a poor listener, rude, impulsive, and disrespectful. When it was time to read in our book bags we paid close attention to the characters in our stories and wrote words to describe their actions on post its.

Ms. Stern had lunch with Eesha and Victoria today. They brought in their coupons and had a lovely time together. They took turns asking each other questions to get to know one another better. Charlie Caps would be SO proud!

In P.E. we used the parachute. We played popcorn. A lot of balls were put on top of the parachute. We held the parachute in our hands with our thumbs on the bottom. Coach would say, “up, up, up…down!” Everyone would slam the parachute down. Some of the balls would go flying and a few even touched the ceiling before coming back down. Amanda thought it was hard to do because the balls kept reaching the parachute and the goal was to get them off. At the end of P.E. we had to collect the balls by crawling on the floor. Everyone was supposed to collect the color ball that matched the color that they were holding on the parachute.

We are finishing up our pieces of writing to be published in Writer’s Workshop. Ms. Stern is working with children one at a time because she is our editor, just like the one that Alyssa Capucilli has. Everyone is working on finishing their stories and then checking to make sure that they have a beginning, middle, and end and also that the writing includes thinking, feelings, dialogue, best spelling, and capitalization and punctuation. That’s a lot of stuff!