Knock knock!
Who's there?
Cows.
Cows who?
Cows go moo, not who!!

Another great day in Room 240 – read on to hear all about it!

After Independent Literacy Time and Morning Meeting, we had Reader’s Workshop. Today we worked on building reading stamina – the amount of time that the kids can spend reading at one stretch. They did both independent and buddy reading, and wrote a reader response to their reading.

After reading, we had a song – the ocean song again, to review, for science and social studies, the names of the oceans. (It’s to the tune of “My Bonny Lies Over the Ocean.”)

We then moved on to Writer’s Workshop. Today, instead of working on a story, we wrote letters – we had some rather exciting news that we will have a new student joining our class on Friday. His name is Owen, and each one of the kids wrote him a note to welcome him to our classroom and to tell about the fun things that we have going on here. They were very sweet notes – ask your child what s/he wrote!

After writing, we got bundled up and headed down for lunch and recess, then back up to our room for another couple of chapters of Mercy Watson. We just had time to three chapters before it was time to go upstairs to the art room for class with Mr. Fairbanks.

When we got back to our room, we had Math Workshop. Today the kids each got to ask all of their classmates the survey question that they developed today and record the results. Tomorrow we will work on taking those data and organizing them onto a graph. Look for the work hanging outside our door in the near future!

After math, we had Science Lab. Today we finished reading a non-fiction book about Orcas (Killer Whales). We are learning both about ocean animals as well as how to get information from a non-fiction text – both are valuable and important first grade skills. Also, Anna’s mom was in to help out, and she helped the kids trace four of those little plastic animals, the kind that expand when you put them in water. They traced them onto graph paper, and tomorrow we will figure out the area that each takes up, to compare them with the “fully grown” versions in a week or so. The dolphin, shark, sea star, and sea turtle are all currently in a bucket in our classroom. We’ll have to see how big they are tomorrow!

After all of that, like usual, it was time to pack up, clean up, and bundle up!