Welcome to September! Despite the short school week we were able to get work accomplished successfully. We are going deeper into our work and building upon the foundation of knowledge we have already created.

Continuing with the Frog theme we were able to learn about where the frog lives—the pond. We started our pond study by reading “Life in a Pond” by Carol K. Lindeen. This book describes some of the wildlife and plants that are found in ponds. We recalled what we read by coming up with a list of plants and animals that live in and near ponds. Then we drew a class drawing of a pond and filled it in with what we had brainstormed on our list of things in ponds. During our Creation Literacy Station some students chose to make their own ponds with markers, oil pastels, and watercolors.

In small group we focused on one particular story that is in “Frog and Toad are Friends” by Arnold Lobel. The story, “The Lost Button” tells the tale of Frog and Toad searching for Toad’s lost button. During the story many other animals try to help them find the lost button. Toad is not pleased because none of the buttons match the one he is missing. He tells them the buttons either are the wrong color, shape, size, or have the wrong number of holes in them. This introduced sorting various buttons by different characteristics. Using the ideas from the book the students sorted their own buttons. Size, shape, color, and number of holes were examined to put the buttons into different piles.

During Writer’s Workshop we spoke about how writers use the correct tools. Students are learning that they are writers. This means they need to use the correct tools. We focused on making sure we used pencils for our writing the words in our stories. At the end of the week we were rewarded with new pencils that had designs on them to use during Writer’s Workshop.

As a class we are listening to a chapter book called “Flat Stanley: His Original Adventure”  by Jeff Brown. Before we began reading we pointed out the Table of Contents and discussed how that is one characteristic of a chapter book. We have also noticed that chapter books have less pictures than picture books.

Each day during Math Workshop we count how many days of school we have had. On Thursday we ran into something interesting as we were charting the days of school. Thursday was the 10th day of school, meaning we were able to introduce place value into our Math routine. The students will continue exploring place value throughout the year.

If you have not turned in the permission slip or paid for our Field Trip to the Great Lakes Science Center please do so as soon as possible. The field trip is on Friday, September 14th.

Have a great weekend!