Week 31

We had a fun-packed week, in spite of STAAR testing. It is always difficult for our younger children to miss specials and recess while the older kids are testing. That is why we try to schedule field trips for these days. Here is what's happening in Mrs. Langham's class this week.

Our focus book of the week was Fish Faces. This nonfiction book was really funny too. We enjoyed looking at the different fish and we especially paid attention to the descriptive language the author was using to describe each fish. We are trying to use descriptive words in our poetry writing too. We have been working on line poems and acrostic poems during writer's workshop.

We had two letters we focused on this week, letter Xx with the help of Foxy Roxy and letter Vv with Victor the Vulture. Our sight words were "has" and "look". 

We integrated insects into language arts too. We are able to read these sight word books too.

We celebrated Earth Day by reading about how to take care of the Earth.

We read a book about where our garbage goes.

We talked about ways we can reduce, recycle and reuse. We practiced sorting things that can be recycled too.

We discussed ways that tires can be recycled and used for other things. Then we did an experiment. We put tires (Cheerios) in a landfill (cup) and we used a marker to see how much space they took up.

Then we reduced our tires by smashing them to make them more compact and take up less space.

We were able to see what a difference this made by comparing it to our original line.

Then we added more ingredients (plaster of Paris and water) to our tires (Cheerios) and reused our tires to make roads.

We recorded our experiment, just like scientists.

We had a great day at the Texas Memorial Museum. Thank you to all of our chaperones who helped escort the class through the museum. Also, thank you to those who provided a much needed snack. Here are just some of the fun things we saw.

We had fun playing in centers this week.

We retold the song/story of the Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly using a storyboard.

We retold the story by making our own books and putting them in order.

We wrapped up our plant unit by creating and labeling the parts of a plant.

Week 30

It was a short, but busy week. Here is what we have been up to in Mrs. Langham's class.

Our focus book of the week was Beetles. We focused on non-fiction text features. It tied in nicely with the beginning of our insect unit.

We learned two letters this week; Gg with the help of Gus the Goat and Ww with Willie and Wanda Walrus. Our sight words this week were "he" and "she". 

We have been reading a lot of poetry. We were introduced to Margaret Wise Brown's poem entitled "Bugs". It is a list poem. We each illustrated a line from the poem and put them in order in a list format.

Here is the finish product.

We applied our learning to making our own list poems. We created rough drafts. Mrs. Langham typed them up and we will be illustrating our own poems next week during our writing time.

In science, we have been learning about the parts of plants and what their importance is. Here are some of the books that we read.

We also learned a lot about ladybugs. We read these books.

We got to observe live ladybugs. We labeled their body parts. Then we released them into our garden.

We learned about the life cycle of the ladybug and created our own life cycles.

I hope everyone has a fantastic Easter weekend. We have our field trip to the Texas Memorial Museum on Wednesday. Due to the field trip, our library day will be on Tuesday. Please return your library books on or before Tuesday.