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.