Circle Writing ...Laura Numeroff Style

Our author study lately has been on Laura Numeroff and circle stories!  Last week, we were so excited to go to the play, If You Give a Mouse and Cookie, at our local Chapman Cultural Center.  It was even more exciting that one of our classroom parents was the Director of the play!!  This wonderful mom also sent in the most adorable snack!  The children were SO excited!  I will attach pictures as soon as I can figure out how to get them off of our grade level camera!  I always enjoy taking children to see plays at the Cultural Center.  It is such a beautiful building and a wonderful chance for students to become aware and exposed to the Arts.

Today, we continued our study on Laura Numeroff with If You Give a Cat a Cupcake.  This is probably my favorite of all of her circle stories!  After reading the stories, we noticed that all of her stories (except for the mouse stories) have ALLITERATION.  This is a new vocabulary word!  Alliteration is when words go together because they have the same beginning sound.  We looked at her other titles, If You Give a Mouse and Muffin, If You Give a Pig a Pancake, If You Give a Pig a Party, and others...
Then the students came up with their own version of her alliteration titles.  Their creativity is below!  Then the students wrote a rough draft of their own version in the writing journals.  Our final copy was written around Felicia Bond's (the illustrator of Laura Numeroff's stories) cupcake from the story!  This is quite the process for 6 year olds!  (Writing is still very challenging for many of them!) All of the children really came away with a strong understanding of circle stories. 

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My Shadow

We had a wonderful day observing our shadows.  In science, we have been studying the similarities and difference in the day and night sky.  I have been waiting on a sunny day to go outside and observe how our shadows change and move throughout the day.  Finally we had a nice day!  We went outside at 4 different times through out the day to see our shadows.  Below is a picture of the students viewing their shadows around noon.  You can also see how we recorded our observations on our new Interwrite board!

Healthy Snacks

All of our students LOVE snack time!  Sometimes we even like to have our snack during the morning.  I would love if we could start having healthy snacks!  I recently read this article http://www.cspinet.org/nutritionpolicy/healthy_school_snacks.html
which offers lots of ideas for very healthy choices!  We are also very appreciative of any extra snacks that are sent!  (Some families are not able to send snack every time their child's name is on the snack calendar.) 
We have a BIG day tomorrow with a very FUN field trip!  Look for more tomorrow!