Half Day!

From Lilly:
We did math in our math book.  We had fun.  

From Mrs. Clough:
Well, we had our very first early dismissal day of the 2012-2013 school year and the time flew just like it does every day!

We started our day by reading a piece of poetry together-echo reading and choral reading.  The poem entitled "What I'd Cook for My Teacher" really humored the kids, and me too! :)  They drew pictures of the jellyfish sandwich, centipede soup, and a-choo-berry pie to go along with the poem in their poetry notebook.

We have finished reading our books by Mark Teague (author and illustrator) and today we made a pictograph where the students had to draw an illustration from their favorite story and place it on our graph.  It turned out pretty well....like I have said many times before, I have some great artists in my classroom!

As a class, our favorite Mark Teague book was Pigsty (it was my favorite, too, although they all are good!)

In math today, we spent a lot of time talking about making estimates, or good guesses.  As Lilly mentioned, we also had fun in math! To do that, we focused on the number of pockets we had on our clothes.  After we estimated, the kids came up and got  counting cubes for each pocket they had on their clothes and recorded the number of students who had a specific number of pockets using tally marks.  Finally, we counted carefully to determine exactly how many pockets there were in our class today by grouping the counting cubes into sticks of 10.

All of our "pocket" data on the board today.

Last week I sent home a newsletter and mentioned making positive phone calls home.  Due to time constraints, I will be emailing parents who provided email addresses in their student information sheets and I will call those who I cannot reach through email.  I am more than willing to be accommodating but am realizing that making 23 phone calls is challenging! BUT-I definitely have many positive things to say about each and every child in my classroom!

Tomorrow will be another very busy day!  I have a fun caterpillar/butterfly project to start, more fun math activities, and I am estimating that we may have our first butterflies in the next two days!  So stay tuned for that!

Mrs. Clough