October 29-November 2

In Reading Workshop we have been reading and rereading Star Books.  These books have good story lines and many of them are classics, you might remember them from your own childhood.  Titles include: Caps For Sale, Harry the Dirty Dog, Corduroy, and many fairy and folk tales.  We've been retelling them, both by ourselves and with our reading partners.  When reading we look at the pictures, make our words match what's happening in the pictures, use character voices and exact words, like "Trip trap, trip trap, who's that tripping over my bridge?"

Have your children told you about our worm bin?  Two years ago one of my students noticed a problem in our classroom.  He noticed that we were throwing a lot of food scraps away and thought we should be composting them instead.  He wrote a letter to Mr. Keith and Mr. Hall stepped in and invited a local vermicomposter to our school.  Since then we've had our own worm bin in the classroom.  We save our fruit and vegetable waste and feed the worms once a week.  When it's time, we sift out the rich vermicompost from the worms and use it in our school garden.

Feeding the worms is a huge motivator for eating fresh fruit and vegetable snacks.  Kids mark a counter on a 10 frame whenever they have fruit or veggies for their snack.  During the month of October we made an amazing 237 counters!

Tree Tuesday, October 30

It was a bit chilly on Tuesday went we went outside.  We started our day learning about how gray squirrels and red squirrels hide their food.  We played a game and everyone got to be both gray and red squirrels.  

Moving logs continues to be a fun activity.

Stump excavation has been going on for a couple of weeks.

Playing games and exploring this part of our woods is fun to do with friends.

Tree Tuesday

When we went outside this morning it was 54 degrees.  It was sunny and the sky was blue. 

This is what the kids had to say about our wonderful morning in the woods.

We went on a hike.  We saw a porcupine and we didn’t want to get close to it.  So we went to our forest site the short way instead of the long way.  We saw a hole in the ground.

We are safe in the woods.  We have to be careful about branches.  We are safe with sticks.  We keep them away from other people.  We don't hit people with them.  We make sure the teacher can see us and we have to be able to see the teacher.  If we see a tick on someone we tell the teacher.  We wore our safety vests.  

When we got to our forest site we built a tree house.  Some people called it a tent.  We used sticks for it.  We played hide and seek.  We played Duck Duck Goose.  Some people played tag.   Some people dug holes.  We saw tracks.   

The Last Couple of Weeks

In Reading Workshop we do both private reading and reading with partners.  We've been reading a lot of nonfiction books.  When we read with partners, we sit side by side, we hold the book in the middle, and we reread to learn more.

Last week we got to take a couple of hikes in the woods.  We had our taste test test in the woods too.  Pears- everyone loved them!

We collected some things on our hike and made a leaf man project, modeled after the book Leaf Man by Lois Ehlert.

 

Yesterday we got together with our 5th grade buddies to pick some beans.  We ate some of them and took the beans out of some of them.  The 5th graders will sell bean seeds in the spring to help pay for their trip to Boston.