Q: What do you call a camel with three humps?
A: Humphrey.

Here’s the update on our day – another good one in Room 240!

After Independent Literacy Time and Morning Meeting, we had Reader’s Workshop. Today I taught the kids about “magic endings” for words (endings like –ing, -ed, -ist, -ly, and –tion). If they come across a tricky word in their reading, they can take off the magic ending, and then try to read the word. After we learned about that, they went off to practice that skill in their reading, both independently and with a buddy.

After reading, we moved on to Writer’s Workshop. Today the kids practiced reading the pieces that they will read to the kindergartners tomorrow at our Writer’s Celebration. They are really good – they will be bringing home a lot of their writing this week. Our next writing unit is poetry, which I’m really looking forward to. (Also, check the blog tomorrow – I will try to post some photos and/or video of the celebration.)

After writing, we headed down to the lunchroom for lunch and then out for recess. When we got back up to our room, we started a new Read Aloud book – Cam Jansen and the Mystery in the Haunted House. After only 2 chapters, it was time to walk down the hallway to the Media Center for class with Mrs. Hennen.

When we got back to our classroom, we skipped over Math Workshop today, and had an extended Science Lab. We learned about the moon, and did an experiment with balls of various sizes – we dropped them into a box of flour (to simulate and asteroid’s impact on the moon) to see how the size and speed of an object affects the size of the crater that it leaves. The experiment looked like this, only without the chocolate powder on it, because... well, super messy.

At the end of Science Lab, the kids finished up the planets that they have been working on – I’m going to hang them in the room tonight. They are all to scale – Jupiter is over two feet across, and Pluto (yes, we included Pluto – we felt badly leaving poor little Pluto out, even though it’s been relegated to a dwarf planet) is the size of a hole punch, like from a three-hole punch machine. The planets are also in scale going across the room – Mercury is about 4 inches from the sun in our model and Pluto is all the way across the room – about 400 inches! Pretty cool stuff.

After that, it was time to pack up and head out!!