I Know an Old Lady...Retelling

One of the best ways to know if a reader is comprehending is having them retell the story they heard.  Today we spent time recreating the Old Lady Who Swallowed a Pie.  This was a VERY FUN activity!  Your reader should be able to use the pieces they made to retell the story to you at home.

There are nine pieces in the story:
a pie
some cider
a roll
a squash
a salad
a turkey
a pot
a cake
some bread.

Be sure to ask your reader what happened to the Old Lady after she swallowed all that stuff!

Here are some fun photos of their work:

Here we are practicing our retelling this afternoon in class.  

 And check out all these hungry Old Ladies!

Happy Reading!

Jog-a-thon

We had a great time at the annual Jog-a-thon yesterday!  Here's our sweet class after it was all over.  If any of our parents have extra jog-a-thon pics, don't forget to send them and we can use them in our blog or in an album.

And the Mosaics GROW...

 It dawned on me tonight that I haven't posted the latest pictures of our Mosaic work.  Here we are putting the finishing touches on our small "take-home" mosaics. For a full explanation of our project, visit this post.  

 And then we got to make the "big" ones with our artists' help.  Lindsey and Chitra, we think you ROCK!  We worked in teams of three to put the stones and glass into our mosaic tiles.  The artists reminded us that mosaics should have space in between the pieces.  They also let us put in the stones that we painted.  Mr. Dragon even stopped by to look at our handiwork.  These beautiful pieces are going to become part of our Courtyard at school.  We are excited to share them with the rest of the Southside community!  

Sometimes Learning's MESSY!

We have been reading a lot of Thanksgiving stories this month.  This morning, our sign-in asked students to pick one of three books and they picked this one:  

Our reading focus has been on characters and setting so we took the characters from the story and created our own little mini-play.  I WISH I had thought to take pictures of the students creating the Mayflower out of materials in our classroom!  They are just so clever!  

After we acted the story out, we reviewed the characters and the setting and each student created a scene from their favorite part of the book.  The only parameters were--they had to have the title, the characters and the setting in their picture.  I put the art materials out and let them " have at it"!  And that's exactly what they did!  Check out some of their work:  

 And here's the messy part:

 But look at this:

 And this Indian Corn BLEW ME AWAY!

 Speaking of Indian Corn...we're making another project that will be fun as we've learned about the Native Americans and how they helped the Pilgrims with their corn crop.  We are using the bottom of paint brushes to make our paper.  We also found out that wooden buttons worked.

 This is how it comes out:

You'll have to wait to see the real finished product NEXT week!

 And here's another nifty little project we finished this week.  We made a turkey for our turkey poems.  I am amazed at how each turkey gets its own characteristics based on the artist.  Check them out:

Yes, sometimes learning's messy...but, in my opinion, that's one of the things that makes it FUN!

Characters and Setting

We have been learning more about fiction story structure this week in reading.  Specifically we are working on characters and setting.  We have learned that characters are the "who" in the story and setting is the "where".  We used our Jack and the Beanstalk field trip to delve into this a bit more.  First, we read "Jack and the Beanstalk" by Matt Faulkner.  We named all the characters (Jack, his Mom, Giant, Giant's Wife, Old Man, Harp).  Then every child made the characters and cut them out.

After we saw the play, we revisited the story, a picture of the stage at the play and thought about WHERE it took place.  We decided there were two settings:  Jack's House and the Giant's House.  Each child created a setting page with these two places represented then put their characters in the setting.

Finally, we labeled all of them.

Here's our learning in pictures:

I HAVE to share the bus photos:

Then we arrived at the theater and saw the beautiful stage:

 And we got to hear from the actors...

When we came back, the next day, we added our characters and setting together to be able to retell the story.  There was a great deal of thinking that went into our work and I am VERY proud of our readers for being able to identify these important story elements!  

Pumpkin Celebration...

Check out the fun from our Pumpkin Celebration day.  A BIG thank you to all of the parents who came in and helped make our day so special.  Enjoy your sweet kiddos and all the learning they did while they played and experimented.

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