Tuesday, March 23, 2010

We started our day by attending the Jan Brett assembly to formally open Brett Boulevard, the back hallway where our classroom is. A parent helped Mrs. Piteo by using the artwork from the book The Umbrella to make a mural at the end of the main hallway. First, we watched a video of Jan talking about making the book. Then Mrs. Polansky read us the story while we looked at the pictures on a humongous screen. Afterwards, we headed to the hallway for the ribbon cutting. It was interesting to learn that it took Jan a year to write the book and Mrs. Malora and her husband over 2 months to do the artwork. It looks beautiful!

After the ribbon cutting ceremony we came back to the classroom and reviewed some of our phonics poems before learning a new one called Soaking My Toes. We used two highlighters today to find ow and oa words. Then we worked backwards in order to practice our newer poems first.

We celebrated Emma’s birthday today. She turned 7. There were vanilla and chocolate cupcakes. The icing was pink and yellow. We also had orange juice. Happy birthday Emma!

We observed the mealworms for the fourth time today. At table 1, Nancy did some really careful observing. Two of the fat things were on their plate. One was darker than the other. The children at that table noticed that the tail was moving. Nancy predicted that a baby mealworm would come out. Dylan A. thought it would get darker and darker. Lauria is predicting that it is in a chrysalis it will turn into a bug. We had a problem at table 3. After lunch, someone found a mealworm on the floor. Unfortunately, it died.

Ms. Stern shared the recording that people wrote in their mealworm journals. She noticed that the thinking taking place is different than the writing. We talked a lot about what we saw, we looked at photos on the Smartboard, we had time to observe, reviewed and made an example together. Everyone is going to work really hard to make their writing match their thinking the next time that we work and to use our time better.

Today was the first day of Gym City. The streets are named. They are Sitting Street, Tummy Turnpike, Hudson Highway, Seeney Street, and Backwards Drive. The classes split up into different stations. We use scooters to move around in different ways, depending on the streets that we are on. When we get to Station #9, we walk around and act as police to make sure that people are following the rules. One person gets to operate the traffic light. It was so much fun! Coach Hudson sprayed us with water on our way out. We are so excited to go back on Thursday!

Eesha shared her favorite website on the blog yesterday. Check out the comments section to find out what it is and to leave your own!