Field Day!

Field Day is Tomorrow!

Hi everyone!

Just a few reminders about tomorrow:

- Red field day shirts are being sent home today. Please make sure your child wears his/her shirt to school tomorrow. Mr. Spencer will not allow phone calls home if anyone forgets.

- Please make sure your child applies sunscreen and bug spray prior to coming to school. We are getting started right away in the morning and will not have time to do this beforehand.

- Everyone needs to bring a bagged lunch. Regular lunch will not be served. I would recommend packing an extra drink or two since we will be outside most of the day. Carefully review the note home from Nurse Susan. Because we have peanut and strawberry allergies, all lunches cannot include these items. Students who bring lunches containing these items will have to sit in a different area separate from kids in our the class for safety reasons. 

- Because of all the rain today, the field is muddy and probably will still be in the morning. All students should come to school wearing sneakers. We will be doing lots of events that involve running on the field.

Thanks so much! I hope I haven't forgot anything. Tomorrow will be such a fun day. I will snap lots of pictures to share with you. :)

Character Book Clubs

We loved our character unit in Reader's Workshop! It was great to see the kids so involved! Each group began the unit with a basket of different books all about the same character. After reading and marking scenes independently, the students partnered up with another group member who was reading about the same character. They worked together to think about how act and speak just as the character would!

In our mini lessons, we discussed how we can find patterns across our books. The students were so smart noticing how similar a character can act across different books! This helped us infer what a character might do based on what we had read about him/her in previous books. We used evidence from the text to support these inferences. 

We also discussed places where we notice the character having strong feelings, and when those strong feelings change. This helped us get to know our character even better and helped us generate a list of character traits that would fit our characters. We did some character mapping in our reader response journals too.

To finish up our unit, each book club is creating a character board. First, we used the illustrations in our books to carefully work together and create a life size drawing of our character. These are completely student made- and they are a riot! I am totally impressed! The students are surrounding their characters with traits to describe what each character is like. This requires group members to really discuss and agree why a character might be responsible, lazy, brave, etc. I love hearing group members say "What makes you think that?" or "Can you give an example from the book?" to really encourage good discussion around traits that truly describe each character!

Here's a sneak peek at groups working on their life-size drawings for their character boards. I will post the finished products soon! I can't wait for you to see them. :)

Health Fair and Mismatch Day

Friday was such a fun day! The kids looked great in their mismatched outfits. We had a blast doing all different activities for the health fair too! We moved around the school to a bunch of stations and learned about all different health and safety topics. We learned about hand washing, staying healthy, allergies, and fire safety. We took a tour of a fire truck and saw a police car. We also got to get active by doing Zumba and all kinds of fitness actvities in the gym. Take a look at the awesome day we had! 

Some mismatch outfits:

Learning about hand washing: 

Learning about allergies:

Talking with the fire marshall:

Tour of the fire truck:

Zumba:

Gym activities: