Days With Mrs. Doran: Week 28 in Review

Greetings from room 119! We have wasted no time getting back to work after a nice break and can't wait to share all we have been doing this week.

Just when we thought our study of insects was over, Mrs. Doran had a surprise for us! Mrs. Nienhaus (who is a second grade teacher) had a Luna Moth and let Mrs. Doran share it with us. Many of us thought that this moth was a butterfly but we learned that we could look at the antennae of the moth to decide what it was... A moth has furry antennae, while butterflies have straight antennae like the ones we often draw in our pictures.

Another difference between the moth and the butterfly is that while moths make a cocoons, butterflies make chrysalis (who knew that Eric Carle's Hungry Caterpillar book was wrong...). Mrs. D. passed around two cocoons for us to hold. One was empty and we could see the hole where the Luna moth crawled out. The other had a Luna moth still inside. When we held them we could feel the difference in the weight and move them just slightly to hear them inside.

Mrs. D. wanted to show us what the Luna Moth looked like before it crawled out of its cocoon. She found a really neat video where we were able to watch the entire life cycle and even see it crawl out of its cocoon. If you would like to see what we viewed, you can click here. We loved learning even more about insects! Next week we will begin studying solids and liquids.

We also learned a lot about the Statue of Liberty this week. We read books and had great discussions! Mrs. D. shared real pictures with us of what the Statue of Liberty looks like because many of us had never heard of it or seen it in pictures. Ask us what we know about the Statue of Liberty! You will be surprised at how much we learned!

We had fun exploring flats, rods and cubes this week in math. A flat is made up of 100 cubes, a rod is made up of 10 cubes and a cube by itself is just one. These manipulative's help us with adding big numbers as well as writing them. In a number like 409 we know that though there are no rods (number in the tens place) we still need to represent that using a 0.

Grace's mom came in on Thursday to help us practice adding using cubes, rods and flats. We had fun playing a game with her. Ask us how we played the game. We also have been practicing counting and writing money amounts. This isn't something that most of us are secure on yet, but practice makes permanent. Consider showing us a few coins each night and help us practice counting them!

This week we started writing Autobiographies (ask us what an autobiography is). We worked on them all week. While we worked on them, Mrs. Doran met with us individually and went over the Mealworm books that we wrote. We went over a rubric with Mrs. D. and many of us realized that we need to work on things like capitals, spelling and neatness. In addition we found areas in our writing that we need to work on. Hopefully the goals we made with Mrs. Doran we will remember when writing our autobiographies.

Because Mrs. Doran has been meeting with us individually, she is not meeting with us in small groups. That doesn't mean we haven't been able to share our writing with other readers. When you are one of Mrs. D's students, you never really leave. Some of Mrs. D's students from when she taught third grade last year came in to help us and listen to our work.

They were really impressed with how well we are writing and that many of us were using similes in our writing. Mrs. Doran hasn't officially taught us about similes, but has used them in her model pieces and many of us have picked up on them. We will learn about similes (formally) when Mrs. Doran starts teaching us more about poetry. Of course good writing often has elements of poetry woven in.

One of the things we enjoyed doing in reading this week was a small Reader's Theater from our Scholastic Magazine. We enjoy reading these 'mini plays' with our friends. On Thursday, a student from Ms. Momeni's classroom came in and listened to us read. It is a great way for us to practice our fluency.

During buddy reading, Trent and Evan made some connections between two of the books that they had. They had a similar story line with different characters. They also noticed that the books were written by the same author and had similar titles. They were excited to share their findings with all of us!

On Friday one of the clues for our Mystery Reader was that it was a Grandpa... Well it sure didn't look like a Grandpa when he arrived! Emily's Grandpa came in to read us the classic tale, "Peter Rabbit" dressed as the Easter Bunny. We all got a great kick out of it and enjoyed the story very much! Our Mystery Reader list is all filled up. Stay tuned though, Mrs. Doran will be adding more dates soon. This has been an activity that has been a huge hit for everyone involved.

Don't forget to click by the name of the person who you are reading for and vote so Mrs. D. knows who is getting the information and check out the slide show below. If you are reading this via email, you will have to click on the link below to take you to the actual blog to see the slide show and vote.