Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Today we had two special Earth Day performances to attend. The first one took place this morning. It was an assembly called The Magic of Recycling. It was all about recycling and magic tricks. A man named Bob Conrad had a puppet that he pretended was his nephew. The puppet was scared of pretty girls because he thought one would kiss him. One of his first tricks was to tear a paper that said RECYCLE on it. He tore it up into lots of pieces before making it one piece of paper again! He also took two sheets of tissue paper, tore them up, and put them back together again to make a pretty hat. Throughout the performance, he would talk about the drinking water we have, pour it into a bowl to empty it, say “That’s ALL the water we have!” and come back to it a little bit more and magically empty more water into the bowl again. He showed us how to make a puppet out of a paper plate and cups. At the end of the performance, Bob chose four kids to go on stage to be part of his Latin percussion band. The instruments were made out of coffee containers, clothing detergent containers, a Pringles container, and an empty tin can.

Ms. Stern read us the Touching the Past book that we made after our trip to Philipsburg Manor. We all worked together to write the captions that explain what we saw and did on our trip. Click on the book cover below to read a copy of our book. Click and drag to turn pages or zoom in for a closer look.

During Reader’s Workshop, Ms. Stern told us which groups we will be in for our non-fiction research. We’ve been learning about features of non-fiction. This week we will begin studying a topic of our choosing. Today we practiced reading text and putting the information that we learned into our own words. That’s important because it’s not right to copy information that other people wrote. The other reason we don’t copy is because we have to understand in order to put ideas into our own words. It’s the evidence that we understood what we read.

After lunch we worked on math. Ms. Stern asked us to complete math problems to show our learning. There were addition and subtraction problems and word problems. It was easy solving the problems. It was trickier to explain our thinking and tell how we use strategies.

In P.E. we played a game about recycling. There were a bunch of bean bags in the middle of the gym. 1 person at a time would grab a bean bag and put it in our hula hoops. There were three or four people in a team. After that, we played a game with a gigantic red inflatable ball that is bigger than either of the coaches. The game was kind of like soccer. Two people from each side worked together to try to move the ball into their goal at the end of the gym. It was hard to push because the people on the other team were pushing against us. The team that got the ball to their goal earned a point. After each round we had to shake hands with our opponents.

At the end of the day we went to our second Earth Day performance. It was put on by Ms. Berube, Ms. Ferzola, and Mrs. Goldstein’s classes. They sang songs like This Pretty Planet, Stop Polluting, and The 3Rs. The kids also recited poems. One of them was called Earth Day. We put the same poem in our poetry journals yesterday! Everyone did a great job. We decided to email the classes when we came back to the classroom to say thank you for inviting us rather than write on the chart paper to try to make less waste by saving resources.

Don’t forget: tomorrow is Earth Day! 40 beautifully decorated bags from our class (along with hundreds more from all of the other classes) are being brought to Shoprite in Northvale to give to customers for their groceries tomorrow.