Week 27: Worm Fiction

Books We Read

Worm Gets A Job

Life of an Earthworm
Ned's New House

Song of the Week

Think I'll Go Eat Worms

Nobody likes me, everybody hates me,
Guess I'll go eat worms,
Long, thin, slimy ones; Short, fat, juicy ones,
Itsy, bitsy, fuzzy wuzzy worms.
Down goes the first one, down goes the second one,
Oh how they wiggle and squirm.
Up comes the first one, up comes the second one,
Oh how they wiggle and squirm.

Weekly Centres
March Portfolio
Now working with a seven colour minimum, we kept adding to our portfolios, writing our words and using our sound out strategies.

Life of a Worm
Our art project for the week was creating "habitats" for worms, using pink pipe cleaners, paper scraps, mini pom-poms and glue.  We had to make sure our worm had a place to crawl through and that it had enough food.

Sight Word Beyblade
We added as, an, are, I and a to our sight word list and "did battle" with them in our Beyblade arena, charting which sight word we read the most.

? + ? = 5 and 5 = ? + ?
5 became the focus of our math this week, as we used rocks, coloured paper clips and bear counters to create math sentences, putting enough items in each circle to make five in total, and practicing using terms like "plus" and "equals".

Other Things We Did
We met our class worms, the red wrigglers!  We'll be keeping these worms in the class for a few weeks, feeding them vegetable scraps, before setting them loose in our garden once the weather improves.

We talked about finding good books to find facts, noting how Worm Gets A Job is a fiction book and probably not good for teaching us about how worms really live, while Life of an Earthworm is non-fiction and uses pictures, realistic drawings and key terms to teach us about worms.  We then decided what was realistic in Ned's New House (birds like to eat worms, worms eat fruit) and what was not realistic (worms having houses with doors, worms baking apple pies, worms getting dressed up like birds)

Math terms like "plus" and "equal" were introduced, as we tried to make 5 in as many different ways as we could.  It was a part of our daily math question and made its way into Mr. McCullough's Message.

"That's Not A Number" became a game we'd play in the class.  Mr. McCullough would write big numbers, letters and symbols on the board and we had to decide what was a number and what wasn't a number.  Then we practiced our number 5 and had a Number 5 Dance Party after!

"OI!"  We learned a new letter-combination sound!!!

For Earth Hour on Friday, we talked about where electricity comes from, why saving it is important, and how it can help the planet.  We then had Earth Hour, doing part of our centres and visiting the library in the dark!!!

Week 26: Spring is Coming

Books We Read
Where the Wild Things Are

Weekly Centres
Letter J
We're almost finished work on our capital letters!  "J" is the second-last letter we will learn!

Flower Blooms
With spring happening a bit later than usual this year, we thought we'd decorate the windowsill with our own spring blooms, made of coloured craft sticks, constuction paper, tissue paper, glue and dot stickers.

Book Club
Everybody in our class can read a little bit by themselves.  Now, we're working on reading together!  Mr. McCullough introduced us to a bunch of short books with easy patterns that help us learn to read.  He also taught us about using pictures and clues, along with the first few letters of a work we can't read, to help us decode new words.

March Break 5
After everybody talked about all the things they did on March Break, we discovered that we all did a lot of the same things, like watching movies, having special dinners, going someplace, playing with friends - so many different things.  So, we each picked five things we did on March Break and drew a small picture of each one.  We then explained our picture to Mr. McCullough

Other Things We Did
We talked about "luck" for St. Patrick's Day and what we should feel lucky for.  We talked about how we should feel lucky that we have nice things, family, friends, food, houses, toys, and all sorts of things that other people might not be lucky enough to have.

We discussed what a "symbol" was when we had to choose between the symbol of St. Patrick's Day and the symbol of Valentine's Day.  We figured out a symbol is a picture that means something without any words, like how a red octagon means "stop" - we didn't even need to see the words stop to know that!

It wasn't too painful when we learned the ou blend from our Jolly Jingles, a blend that let us read words like "out" and "ouch" and "about".

It was a March Break Show & Share week, as everybody brought in something from their March Break to talk about (although some people just brought what they wanted, which was okay, too.)

Week 25: Follow the Drinking Gourd to Break!

Books We Read
Abiyoyo
Aliens Love Underpants

This Week's Activities
The Letter I
We kept working on our top-middle letters, creating the letter "I".  We tried to make the "fancy" I, adding the two lines on the top and the bottom.

Make 5
As a special math challenge, everybody was asked to show us "five" one way or the other.  We had people using fingers, markers, books, colours, the actual number, and even names with five letters in it.

Drinking Gourd Maps
After rereading "Follow the Drinking Gourd" and practicing the song, we used the words and images to create our own maps, drawing pictures of dead trees, safe houses, rivers, hills and quails!

Other Things We Did

As soon as we heard the quail call, we went around the school on Friday afternoon, following the drinking gourd to safe houses, up hills, across rivers, past old forests, hiding from guards and dogs, all the way until we got to the safety of our classroom!  We looked for quilts to lead us to safe places and eventually made our way to the "freedom" of our classroom!  We also learned more about Harriet Tubman and how she helped slaves find their way to Canada!