Hello all,

Once again, I apologize for the lack of posts. We have had a glut of meetings after school for the past couple of weeks, and it has been busy.

On Friday, for those who might be interested, I was out because I was presenting at a Writing/Literacy Conference for teachers that was held at the College of Saint Benedict in St. Joseph, MN. I presented with our Literacy Coach, Megan Pershica, and I'm proud to say that everyone there was VERY impressed by your children's writing (of course I took samples to brag with...). If you 'd like to know more, you can access the brochure for the conference here.

Today, however, was a great day in room 240. After Independent Reading time and Morning Meeting, I decided to switch the normal order of the morning – we had Writer’s Workshop first, and then had Reader’s Workshop. The kids came in this morning with so many stories, and they were so excited about their stories, that I just had to let them write first off. They wrote some amazing pieces today – be sure to ask them all about them!

After Writing, we had our musical interlude – a fun song that we sing to get the kids up and moving a little bit before the next part of our morning. Today we sang an old favorite – “Someone’s Taking Us to the Zoo Tomorrow.” After that, we had Reader’s Workshop, in which we went shopping for new books for the book bags, and also got to do Buddy Reading, which the kids love. They also recorded their books that they read on their book log and then wrote a short reader response in their journal.

After that, it was time to head down to the lunchroom for lunch, and then out to recess. When we got back up to our room, we started a new book, called Cam Jansen and the Scary Snake Mystery, which Ray was nice enough to bring in for us to enjoy. After Chapter 1 (which had a nice cliff hanger ending), we went down to the gym for class with Mr. Hill and Mr. Peterson.

When we got back up to our room, we had Math Workshop, in which we worked on solving addition story problems using manipulatives (hands-on items to visualize the problem). We finished workshop with a nice discussion of the various strategies and methods that they kids used to solve and keep track of the multiple solutions.

After Math, we had Science Lab. In Science we are wrapping up our unit on Organisms, so today we had a discussion as a class comparing people to plants. We also made a Venn Diagram of our ideas, which we will continue to work on tomorrow. Also tomorrow, we will compare ourselves to other animals, to see similarities and differences.

After all of that, it was time to wrap everything up and head home!