Dogs and Newspapers

No, it is not what you think! We are progressing right along with our dog learning as well as our 2nd week of our newspaper mini-unit!

This week we discussed the life cycle of dogs! The kids did a wonderful job researching and creating the life cycle.

Sorry the picture is so dark! This is Dr. Safris who came to speak to our class about how vets help take car of our dogs

Meeting one of the dogs that came to visit

Ms. Getz brought in her ADORABLE puppy!

Ms. Getz taught her dog to sit on his bottom so he wouldn't knock people over.

OH so many dogs brought in to share!!

Meeting a therapy dog. What a sweetie!

Another one of our great dogs!

The kids did a great job with the life cycle and even figured out how old they would be in dog years! We had to use some blocks because it is pretty high math but they figured out that our 5 year olds are 35 dog years, 6 year olds are 42 dog years and 7 year olds are 49 dog year. Great math guys!

We started diving into the parts of the newspaper this week. The kids and I discussed what a headline was and looked for them throughout the newspaper.


They then sorted headlines into 5 groups: Editorials, Classified Ads, Entertainment, Sports, and World News. They did a wonderful job with this activity and it also gave us a chance to discuss opinions (editorials) versus facts (world news stories).

Arrrgg.....

 Oh my did we have a fun Friday!!! We spent the entire week studying the Bossy R. We read Pirate Mark, sang bossy r songs, and searched for ar words in books and poems. To culminate our study of the bossy r sound the kids and I dressed up at pirates! They got really into it, and had some wonderful outfits!!

The pirates hard at work

On our way to see some REAL pirates!

Long John Silver's brought some of their pirates
to come and visit us! The kids were so excited!

       In addition to all the pirate fun we also continued our study of dogs and a few parents actually brought in their dogs!

So pretty and well behaved!

      The kids had lots of great questions for the dog owners and we learned a little about how to take care of a dog, how to teach a dog tricks, and most importantly how to greet and pet a dog the right way!

Telling us all about his dog :)

Go, go, go!

                        What a busy, busy week back after spring break! We jumped right back into our curriculum because we have less than 40 days left to get ourselves ready to be 1^st and 2^nd graders!!

            Here are some of the highlights from our week:

Reading:

            Text connections- We have been reading lots and lots of books and making connections with the stories. The kids have learned about the three different types of connections you can make; text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-world. This is an easy skill to work on at home! After you and your child read a book ask them if they have any connections they want to make. With 5, 6, and 7 year-olds they always have a story or connection. :)  We want to continue to foster that skill in reading!

            Compound words- The kids played a compound word game and made their own compound word flip books. Compound words go well with our reading strategies to figure out words. They go with the find a smaller word you know. For example, snowball. If the child can read those words separately they can read it when they are a nice long word!

Writing:

         ACTION poems! Students chose a topic and wrote their own poem using lots of action words. SO cute!

Projects:

         DOGS, DOGS, DOGS!!!! We are SOOOOO excited for this final project! We wrote our dog memories, what we know about dogs, and what we want to learn about the different dogs. The kids already know SO much and we are learning more every day.

Civic Center:

         We had the chance to go to the Civic Center and watch Darwin the Dinosaur. The kids were really impressed with the light show and how the actors could do an entire play with no words.           

            And they were so cute with all of their pretty outfits and their excited smiles.