Another great day in Room 240!

After Independent Literacy Time and Morning Meeting, we had Reader’s Workshop. Today I introduced the kids to our newest author study – Eloise Greenfield. She is a poet, and has published all sorts of books, from fiction to non-fiction and biography, and from picture books to chapter books to poetry. We will focus mostly on her poetry, which is wonderful. The kids will be reading her work in Reading Group with me, as well as a whole class. Today, after learning some facts about our new friend and mentor Eloise, I read two of her poems to the kids – "Lessie" and “Honey I Love.” Both are from her book called Honey I Love. We also talked about how Eloise always tries to find precisely the right word to write – and when the kids went off to read, they looked for examples in their books of how the author looked for just the right word to tell the story.

After reading, we went on to Writer’s Workshop, which is really an extension of Reader’s Workshop. Today we talked again about seeing objects “with a poet’s eye” – to look at something commonplace and see it in an uncommon way (like Eloise describing her neighbor spraying her with a hose on a hot day as a “flying pool”). After we brainstormed a list of things in the room that would be good to look at with a poet’s eye, the kids used their poetry journals to record their observations. They were really great, like this one – I have a big, thick textbook in the room, and one of the kids saw it as “a huge, thick word cake, ready to be eaten.”

When we finished with Writer’s Workshop, we got ready for lunch, and headed down to the lunchroom, and then out for recess. When we got back up to the room, we read some more of our Jigsaw Jones book for Read Aloud, and then went down to the gym for class with Mr. Hill and Mr. Peterson.

When we got back up to our room, it was time for Math Workshop. Today the kids played two games with a partner – one was addition practice, and the other was subtraction practice.

After math, we had Science Lab. We tried to make sense of the experiment that we did yesterday – how to get a light bulb to light up with a wire, a D cell battery, and a small light bulb. We were left with this question – why do we need the wire to make it work? Why can’t we just hook up the light bulb to the end of the battery, since we figured out that the electricity is in the battery? We’ll try top sort out that question tomorrow in Science Lab with another experiment.

After all of that, it was time to head home!