Hello family and friends!
I hope everyone had a wonderful Spring Break. It has been a busy but great week back for us and the kids. It's hard to believe that we only have 3 more weeks left of school. This has been such a fun year with a sweet group of kids. To start off our last month of school, we did an author study on Mo Willems. Throughout an author study we read books by the author, talk about the different parts of a book, discuss the writing process that authors go through, and discuss what we like (and don't like) about the authors writing style. It's a time for us to discover more books but also a time for us to relate reading to our real life experiences. We chose Mo Willems because the kids LOVE his books. If you haven't heard of him then I encourage you to check out some of his books at the library. Our class' favorite series of his is the Elephant and Piggy collection. The books are funny but also teach us some valuable lessons. In this series the author uses text bubbles to show dialogue. The grey bubbles represent the elephant and the pink ones represent the pig. As we read through these books we noticed the text was different from many other read alouds we've done. He makes some words huge to represent a loud reading and some words small to represent the opposite. We learned that you can tell a lot about how a character feels by the way the text looks. Even if we didn't yet know a word, we could still tell the tone that the word should be read in.
To start our study we read all the Mo Willems books we could find. We talked about the characters, their feelings, and their importance to the stories. We talked about the purpose of an author and illustrator, as well as the tone the author uses when he writes. We also learned that some books can be funny! We had a great time laughing through these books and then afterwards talking about the feelings of the characters and what events they went through. After we read several books we made a chart of our favorite books. We each wrote our name on a piece of paper and glued it under a picture of our favorite book. As we voted we told everyone what we liked about that book and why it was our favorite. This got us discussing the books and reflecting on the sequence of events that took place in each story. This chart is in the hallway so make sure to check it out!
After spending time learning about the parts of a book and the writing process, we decided to write our own stories. We let the kids take complete liberty with what they wrote. They picked the genre, characters, and story line. We sat down with each child individually and talked them through the process. We started with talking out our storyline and what our characters were going to be. Next, we drew pictures of what was happening in our story. After getting our story on paper through illustrations, we thought of a title and completed our front covers. Most of the class wanted Michelle and I to write the words out so we went back through the story with them and wrote word for word what they told us. Some of the kids chose to write a few words of their own. I noticed some of them writing words really small or really big. When I asked why they chose to write the words that way, they informed me that they were writing like Mo Willems. They really put some thought into these books and they look great! Take some time to read them in the hallway...some of them are hilarious!
We also spent some time this week putting on a puppet show! We printed off an elephant and piggy character and taped it to a ruler as a handle. We decided to use our long table as a stage and 2 kids at a time took turns hiding behind the table and used their puppet to tell a story. Some of the partners chose to retell a Mo Willems story while others chose to make up their own story together. This time was too funny. The kids LOVED it! The audience was cracking up as elephant and piggy went on all kinds of crazy adventures. The kids didn't want this time to end so we concluded that we would continue talking about puppets and theaters into next week. The kids want to build their own little puppet stage and make some props and puppets of their own. I honestly didn't think they would run with this like they did, but I'm so happy that they found something to get excited about! I'm assuming this will be the main part of our exploration next week. I can't wait to see what they come up with!
We also spent this week talking about all of our wonderful moms! The kids took their time decorating mugs for their mom. We used oil based sharpies to decorate them and then put them in the oven to cure. These mugs will hold up in both the microwave and dishwasher. The kids really got excited about having a special surprise for their mom (I'm hoping it stayed a surprise for most of you, haha). We also talked about some of our favorite things about our mom and typed them up. We taped those to a picture that they drew for their moms and laminated them. These kids are so sweet and love their moms so much! We hope you like them and know how much we love and appreciate you as you use them!
A very happy Mother's Day to all of our wonderful moms! I hope your weekend is restful and enjoyable!
Love,
Ms. Rachael
Approaches to Learning
- Demonstrate growing ability to predict possible outcomes based on prior experiences and knowledge.
- Demonstrate increasing ability to use prior knowledge to understand new experiences.
- Represent prior events and personal experiences in one or more ways.
- Understand a task can be accomplished through several steps.
Social & Emotional
- Interact easily with familiar adults by engaging in conversations, responding to questions and following directions.
- Participate in group life of class.
- Develop friendship with one or town preferred children.
- Display emerging social skills of trying to take turns and talk with others during play.
- Demonstrate strategies to join play group with adult support.
Language & Literacy
- Carry out simple directions and directives.
- Complete a thought or idea when communicating with others.
- Classify objects and information by observable attributes into predetermined categories.
- Begin to use classroom resources such as books, charts, photographs and graphs to gain information about topics of interest.
- Represent familiar people and experiences through art and language.
- Combine some letters with pretend writing.
- Begin to understand the relationship between oral language and written language.
Mathematics
- Organize and represent data with real objects.
- Compare the lengths of two objects.
- Understand and use positional words to describe the location of objects.
- Identify the positions first through tenth using concrete objects.
- Compare sets of no more than ten objects using the terms "more than" or "same as".
- Begin to show an awareness of numbers in the environment.
We are authors! Working hard on our books...
As you can tell from the faces below, our puppet show was hilarious...
Making presents for our awesome moms!...
We also said good bye to Mr. Rogdrick this week. We wish him all the best in the future!...
