Thursday, February 26th 2009

Today was a busy day! Our question of the day was: Which animal would you rather have as a pet: an elephant, a pig, or a bear? We learned that 24 of our friends would rather have a pig, 4 of our friends would like an elephant, and 8 of our friends preferred a bear. We also practiced writing math sentences to show that 24 is greater than 4, 8 is greater than 4, and 8 is less than 24.

During Reading Workshop, we learned a new strategy to help us when reading non-fiction books, visualizing, where we make pictures in our heads to help us understand what the author is telling us. We practiced reading one page at a time, and then drawing what we heard. After we drew what we pictured in our head, we compared it to what the illustrator drew, and talked about similarities or differences.

During Writing Workshop, we gathered all of our notes that we have been taking about Spiders and each of us chose three important facts that we are going to use to include in our class book All About Spiders. We then wrote out our sentences on sentence strips, which will help us when we organize our facts to put the information into various sections.

Our word study activity for Thursday is Look, Say, Cover, Write, Check. We continued to practice this, as some of our friends are still working on writing them one word at a time: first using the pencil, then in crayon, and finally in marker. This is a great practice for our word study tests, which are on Fridays.