A Garden is a System

We have been learning about how a garden is a system and how that system has many parts. Those parts all work together and need each other in order for the whole system to work. Below are a few diagrams we drew recently to show the parts of the system. Be sure to check out our Kidblog page for some blog posts with ShowMes explaining how the parts work together.

Thank You Notes
I got such a nice gift today. It was a beautiful wooden box filled with thank you notes from the crew. Wendy got one, too. She will enjoy hers when she is feeling better and can come back to school. (She has a sore throat and other cold symptoms.) I haven't had a chance to read my notes yet. I will save them for after school. They will be a nice way to wind down from the day. Thank you all.

Homework 
Reading ~ Read a good book or two.
Math ~ Home Link 10.2  Telling Time

Vowels

Oh, those vowels. They are so tricky and hard to get a handle on when you are first learning about words. During our work work time, we have been learning about how there are many ways to spell the long vowels sounds. We have worked with the silent e, vowel pairs (when two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking) and other spelling patterns. We will continue to work on these topics for a while longer. The photo below shows some of the work we have done with vowels. (Remember, you can click on a photo to see a large version.)

If you would like to hear a student's perspective on this vowel work, then take a look at Chloe's ShowMe below:





More Series Books
The latest book series that we are exploring are Fluffy the Guinea Pig and Mercy Watson (a regular pig). Both series are very funny and the crew is already enjoying them. Check out the photos below. There are many books in both series so be sure to check some out on your next trip to the library.

Homework
Reading ~ Read a good book or two.
Math ~ Home Link 10.1 Graphing Birth Months

Important Dates
5/21 6th Grade Portfolio Showcase (For more information, click here.)

5/26 No School - Memorial Day

6/4 Last Day of School 

Sight Words

Our new sight words are: girl, new, night, thing, very
  
Previous words include: and, going, of, for, like, little, look, saw, she, said, the, thing, they, was, with, come, get, from, have, are, some, went, want, out, her, very, favorite, made, here, night, friend, when, because, talk, could, out, one, some, this, there, really, nice, good, house

We are working on learning to spell these words correctly. We can read them, now we must learn to write them. These are great words to point out to your child when they are reading or to have them practice spelling at home, too. 

Ask your child to explain how we practice these words at school using the Look, Say, Cover, Write, Check method.

Homework
No homework for the weekend. Enjoy some great books with your child.

IA
Our IA next week is PE. Be sure to dress appropriately.

The Three Little Pigs

Our new writing genre is variations of a fairy tale. We are currently reading many different versions of the story of the three little pigs - some of them are very funny. After we have read a large selection of these, we will try writing new version of the story of the three little pigs ourselves. It should be fun! Some of the versions that we are reading are shown below. (Click on the picture to see a larger version.)

Next time you visit the library, you might look for variations of other fairy tales like Cinderella (there are many of these), The Three Little Bears and more. These are great books to read aloud!


Homework
Reading ~ Read a good book or two.
Math ~ Unit 10 Family Letter: End-of-Year Reviews and Assessments

Getting the Garden Ready

Yesterday we spent some time getting the school garden ready to plant. We had to take out all of the old, dead plants and weeds. Tomorrow we will dig around and loosen up the soil. If your child wants to bring in gardening gloves or small trowels to use, that would be great.  Enjoy the pictures below. Thanks to everyone who sent in extra tools to share with the crew - a special thanks to Angie N. for sending in a bag of 15 trowels.

Homework
Reading ~ Read a good book or two.
Math ~ Review for tomorrow's test over greater than, less than, sharing groups of items equally, story problems, telling time, Function Machines (in/out boxes), counting Base 10 blocks, addition and subtraction problems and money problems.

Library
We have library tomorrow. Please help your child remember to return his or her books. This will be our last week to check out books. All library books will be due for the year on May 15th.

Door Decoration

I wanted you all to be able to see the beautiful door decoration that Amy M. made for our Wendy and I for Teacher Appreciation Day. I love it! Thanks also for yummy lunch from Noodles and Company today.

Clementine

We just finished reading the book, Clementine by Sara Pennypacker, aloud. We have loved it. It is both very funny and very sweet at the same time. Here is a brief description of the book from Sara Pennypacker's website:

Clementine

In this first book of the series, Clementine tries to help out her friend Margaret, but ends up in a lot of trouble for it. Things get worse each day of the week, until finally she's worried that Margaret is right: Clementine's parents might consider her "the hard one" in the family. They're up to something mysterious...are they thinking they'd be better off if they only had her little vegetable-named brother..."the easy one"?

We have had some great laughs and great discussions while reading this book. We have been learning about understanding what we are reading and taking our thinking a little deeper. This book does just that. We had lots of questions as we read and needed to learn a knew word to describe how Clementine felt most of the time in the book - misunderstood. Clementine has attention issues which most first graders can relate to. As Clementine always says, she is paying attention - just not to the things that the adults around her think are important. I love this book as an adult and would recommend it to you. It is similar to Disney movies in how it puts in a few lines that only adults will understand.

There are more books in this series so I highly recommend them as a family read aloud. The whole family will enjoy them.

The video below shows what the crew did when they wanted me to read more from the Clementine book. This video was staged because I couldn't get a good video of this occurring naturally. (Mr. Todd saw them doing this yesterday and wondered who Clementine was?) I did not start this and I am not sure who did. What teacher can resist something like this? Of course, I read more to them. (If you get this post by email, you will need to go directly to the blog to view the 30 second video. They are all so cute that it will be worth it!)

We created a Padlet to share our thoughts about the book. A Padlet is an electronic sticky note wall. Once I create a wall, the crew just has to go to the wall and click twice to add their own sticky note with their ideas. You can do this from an ipad or a computer. Any viewer can rearrange the sticky notes or add a new sticky note. There are scroll bars along the bottom and side to navigate around the screen. Ours is shown below and it is also on the Resources page of our crew blog. You can also click here to view our Padlet. Now that we have learned how to use Padlet, I bet the ideas we share during our next read aloud will be much deeper.

Created with Padlet