Shadow Play

Last week we started a unit on Space.  We started out talking about the sun.  We put out some small bears, called "Shadow Bears."  We measured the length and direction of his shadow at different parts of the day. The sun seemed to change positions throughout the day.  But we learned later, that it's the Earth that's moving.  We practiced changing the shape of our shadows too.  We traced our partners shadow in different positions, using chalk!

In Reading, we've been practicing making inferences based on what the words and pictures tell us.  We used colored sticky notes to make inferences throughout the book The Night Tree.

We've also been learning about landforms.  Last Thursday, we used icing, graham crackers, and different kinds of candy to make islands.  Our islands had to have a lake, a river, a plain, a mountain, and some hills.

Here's how they turned out!

On Monday, we finished up our Moon projects.  It was a long process...first, we used found out some facts about the moon and recorded them.  Next, we cut a moon from white paper.  The moon has lots of craters... we used big globs of glue to make ours.  After letting them dry over night, they were ready to paint!

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Some Fun We've Been Having...

We finished out our Senses unit with a little snack.

We used our 5 senses to describe popcorn!

After describing how the popcorn sounded, smelled, felt and what it looked like...we got to eat it! :)

In Social Studies, we've been talking about citizenship.

Part of being a good citizen is voting.

We voted on which teacher we would like to come and read us a story.

Coach Myers won by a landslide!

We learned a couple weeks ago about when we use capital letters.  To help us hold our learning in, we wore "Caps" for "Capitals"!

We used receipt tape and wrote our numbers in order.

We colored Gus the Hungry Monster and labeled all his food with short u words.

We made frogs from paper plates and labeled them with short o words.

In Math, we've been working on finding out if numbers are even or odd.  We searched through magazines and found even and odd pictures.

We've also been working on numbers that are greater and less than another number.  We learned about the hungry alligator that only wants to eat the biggest numbers.  We used pipe cleaners to make our alligator mouths.

Night Tree

Today we worked on making predictions from books.  We learned that sometimes our predictions might change when we get further into a book.  We used the book Night Tree by Eve Bunting.

First we made predictions just by looking at the cover.

Vicente: I think it's about a tree in the night.

Kate: I think it is about a tree.

Nyssa: It's going to tell you about the night.

Kaitlynn:  The night tree is in the night.

Nadia: It's going to be about a Christmas tree.

Darrius: It's a Christmas tree outside.

Then we read all the way to page 13 and made another prediction.

Daniel: They are going to cut down the tree.

Mia: They will cut it down and take it home to decorate it.

Liam: They might get scared.

Dominick: The owl is going to get the people.

Ashley: It is a noise that they're going to hear.

Student: I think the owl is going to tell them a secret.

Next we read page 13 and found out what they were going to do to the tree.

Ethan: They are decorting the tree in the forest.

Javon: They are decorating the tree.

Andrew: The will decorate all the trees.

Catherine: They are going to decorate the tree.

Last, we finished the story and found out they were decorating the tree with food for all the animals in the forest!