Another nice day in Room 240! Our schedule was a bit mixed up, but we all came through just fine, I think.

After Independent Literacy Time and Morning Meeting, we had Science Lab instead of Reader’s Workshop. We worked on the vocabulary that would be included in the presentation in the Exploradome. The kids learned the words, and illustrated them. They should have brought the mini-books that we made home today.

After Science Lab, we headed down to the gym for our session in the Exploradome. It was really cool – the program that we saw was called “The Night Sky” – we saw constellations and talked about the sun and moon rising and setting. It was quite a sight to see all of us (me included) laying inside this huge bubble on our backs, looking up at the screen. It was very well done, and a great kick-off to our mini-unit on space in science.

We had just a little bit of time before lunch, so we came back up to our classroom and finished the Cam Jansen mystery that we started this week. After lunch and recess, we were back up in the room for Read Aloud – we chose Mr. Putter and Tabby Make a Wish. By this point, Mr. Putter and his cat Tabby are old friends of ours. After Read Aloud, we headed upstairs to the art room for class with Mr. Fairbanks.

When we got back down to the room, we had Writer’s Workshop. Today the mini-lesson was about what to do when the kids have a writing conference with me during their writing time. The goal is to get them to talk not only about the topic of their writing, but what they are doing as a writer (techniques like adding dialogue, using fancy words, adding more details, or even taking some details out). The additional point is to get them to think about why they would use a particular technique in their writing – to what effect.

After writing, we moved on to Math Workshop. The kids played a card game in which they had to match up pairs of number cards that add to ten. It was sort of like the game Concentration, except all of the cards were face up.

After all of that (whew!) it was time to head home!