Poetry, Making Our Book, Math Night & More!

This week was packed full of learning and fun activities! We have some exciting things that we can't wait to share with you all! The students decorated their poetry journal covers that they will be taking home after our Poetry Cafe with all of their poems they have written! We focused on taking our time and shading to make them all turn out so beautiful!

We wrote our last 3 types of poems this week. We worked on acrostic, concrete, and I wish poems. Here is a look at some of our acrostic poems. We did a page for a spring acrostic poem together and then the students created one about their name on their own.

Here is a look at the concrete poems we worked on. These were the students favorites this year! They were so creative in the different types of concrete poems they were creating. Below is Braylon making a "Trees" poem and Jaden making a "Flag" poem. 

Carson made a "Sun" poem & Betsy made one about "Hearts".

Here are a few about rain, ice cream & cookies.

The last type of poem is our "I Wish" poem. Soeil said, "I wish that no one gets hurt. I wish for a factory to make jellybeans. I wish that I can wish on a star. I wish that there is no school."

Brooklyn said, "I wish that I have a hamster. I wish that I had $300. I wish that I had a dog." 

Jaden said, "I wish I had a gingerbread man. I wish I had more toys. I wish I had a dog."

We continued to share our poetry work with our classmates. They enjoyed listening to each other's work and have become inspired to do their best work to share with their friends.

We have begun working on our Student Treasures book that we will be publishing. Now that we had finished writing all of the different types of poems, the students went through their work and chose the poem that they thought was their best work. We wrote another draft of the poem on paper that was similar to the paper for our book. We have to use pen on the final copy for the book so we were practicing writing our poems to help us not make any mistakes. I also got an erasable pen for us to use, just in case! Below you can see Isabella writing our dedication page for our book. We are dedicating our book to our families.

We also worked on our cover and title pages for our book. Each student was able to contribute something to either our cover or title page in order to make it a group effort! We were able to use color on our cover page but the title page had to be black and white. 

The students are so proud of their work and they should be because they turned out so beautiful!

Below you can see our finished cover page on the left and title page on the right. 

We also began working on our final illustration for our book. We looked at our poem and thought about what it was about. We used markers to complete our illustrations and took our time to make them look neat and filled with details. I can't wait until you all get to see our finished book! 

Please don't forget to turn in your order forms by Monday if you want to order a copy.

Thursday night was our family math carnival. It was so nice to see so many of our students there and having a great time playing the math games! I was happy to see our friends coming to visit me at the estimation station. Below are the four mason jars that the students had to guess how many of each object were in each one.

This is the paper that the students used to make their guesses. On Friday, we sent the objects home with the students who guessed the closest. The crayons had three people who tied so we split them up! The students all seemed to enjoy this station.

Amir & his family won the raffle for the game basket and they were very excited!

On Friday we had a few high schoolers visit for the annual book drive. They read If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, the students colored a picture from the story, they brought cookies for us to enjoy, and then passed out a book to each student for them to take home and keep.

The students were so excited that they got to keep the books! Colemann wants to be a doctor so he was thrilled to get an encyclopedia of the human body!

This week we also received caterpillars. We have added them to our science area and will be observing them throughout their life cycle. The students are using self-control to only use their eyes to observe these caterpillars since they are so fragile. They will take about 2 weeks to make their chrysalis and then about another week or so to hatch into butterflies. Once they hatch, we will release them outside. 

The app that we used to look at David Michael Slater's books, Tiny Tap, saw our blog post last week. They tweeted about us and our post so that was pretty exciting! 

Also this week, a goose has decided to lay her eggs and make a nest underneath one of our slides. The students were very excited to count 5 eggs on Monday and observe them throughout the week until we counted 8 on Friday! We also found another nest in tall grass on another part of our playground. The students were very respectful of the eggs and did not touch but instead only used their eyes to observe in amazement. One of the days we even saw the momma guarding her eggs and stayed far away!

The students were inspired by the goose egg nest we found on our playground and decided to make their own out of mulch and rocks.

There has been a pile of mulch on our playground for a couple of weeks now. We finally have gotten most of it spread out on our playground now after some hard work! We used shovels to scoop it into wheelbarrows and then rakes to spread it out. 

As Soleil and Isabella said on Friday, "This is hard work!"

It has been a while but we were finally able to get our work from the hundredth day of school up on the bulletin boards! Take a look at our hundreds chart that our students made along with the students of four other classes. It looks so beautiful! We were happy to get it up on the bulletin board in time for math night so parents were able to see it.

We also put a bulletin board up with 100 reasons why we love our school! This one is facing the front doors right outside the gym. Again, we completed this with four other classes. The students were so proud of all their hard work in these and they should be!

Don't forget that our field trip is coming up this Wednesday. Be looking for papers coming home with more information.

Thanks for stopping by! Have a great week!

Mrs. Brittany Garrabrant