I have recently introduced a few minutes of yoga into our morning routine. I am by no means an expert so I went to Barnes and Noble and picked up a copy of Yoga Kids; Keeping Busy Kids Fit and Relaxed by Kirsten Hall. The book is awesome!!! The book has all of these developmentally appropriate adaptations of yoga poses and really fun names for breathing exercises. It also came with these adorable cards that show pictures of what the pose should look like not that they would have any questions of proper form with my demonstration... hah! 

      The practice of yoga seems to make them more aware of how they move and their physical place which should help with spatial awareness. I like how it calms them and taps into their creativity too. They like to think of their own poses which I let them do on occasion and everyone else will copy the pose. This is helping with self-confidence which is a character trait we want them to learn. Yoga also adds increased exposure to being in front of a crowd which is a very important life skill. I am excited to see how much yoga will help with increased focus in the classroom!

What I love this Wednesday

What I Love Wednesday

I love:

• Working on the publishing of our book “The Girl Who Cried Cat”
• Completing our paper version of Mr. Gallon Man (ask your kids!)
• Creating a real gallon man in the near future
• Seeing the kids use some of the manners that they learned at the first, of three, etiquette lesson
• TEACHING!!! Teaching is the best job in the whole world. I love the morning routine, the creative writing, the feeling that some things that you teach are their first exposure to that topic...ever, creating fun and engaging centers, seeing improvement in their scores from pre and post assessments, and of course the funny things they always say!!! Just this last week I was mentioning how I like to read in my free time and that I picked this habit up from my parents. I followed that thought with telling a student I might just visit my parents this weekend. My statement was followed by craned necks and curious stares and FINALLY someone spoke up and said, “Your parents are still around?!?” Nice. J I wonder if we will address this question and others like it in our etiquette lesson?!

Here are a few snapshots of their first etiquette lesson:

A Letter from David Shannon!!!

   If you can remember a few months back you might recall our author study on David Shannon. We discussed his many hilarious books, learned new vocabulary like "extraordinary", mapped where David Shannon lives in reference to where we live, wrote our own versions of "The Bad Case of the Stripes", watched interviews and compiled our very own questions we would as Mr. Shannon if ever we were to meet him, created our own little "David'" from the "No David" books, and wrote our own book "Why We Love the Many Books of David Shannon." We concluded our study with letters to David Shannon. We sent them away hoping he would read our words of adoration and much to our surprise he wrote us back!!!

Here are a few snapshots of the letter.

Later that day one of the kids asked if we could frame the letter. So, we held a vote for the color frame we desired. Now, it seems that David Shannon's letter will be neatly displayed in a gold frame. :)

Contraction Surgery!!!

  We have been so great about noticing punctuation that we have been inserting apostrophes where they don't belong! To clear up any misconceptions we turned our room into an operating room and conducted "Contraction Surgery" an activity I came across while searching www.spellingcity.com for a list of commonly used contractions. We had a guest visitor Mr. Wilson, a soon to be doctor, specializing in sentence surgery for the day come to help with the operations.
 To set up the lesson I wrote phrases on sentence strips that could be turned into contractions. (ie. she is, he will, we would...) We cut out the unnecessary letters and formed contractions. When we tried to operate on "will not" we thought our patient was nearly inoperable until Dr. Mecoli, one of our principals, realized we may just need a transplant! How funny!?! We made the necessary incisions, used invisible stitches when necessary, and used band-aids to patch our sentence strip patients up and serve as the apostrophe.

A discussion on why it is important to wear gloves during surgery:

 Lining up to scrub in for surgery:

Hand sanitizer- the proper method of scrubbing up for contraction surgery:

Scrubbing under our fingernails:

We couldn't stop laughing one size fits all gloves were way to big for the kids!

Here we are putting face masks on in preparation for the surgeries. 

A very difficult patient:

What are we going to do with this guy?! 

Look at the concentration! 

A successful day at the Sentence Surgery room- Contraction Surgery unit!!!

Happy patients. :) 

A huge thank you to the letter donor, the word not, for a successful contraction transplant!!!

Kites!

  Today for our unit on measurement we measured cellophane, straws, ribbon, and yarn to create kites. One incorrect measurement and our kites may not have flown! Here are some pictures of our first flight. We are going to go back to the drawing board and think of ways we could cut away inches of kite parts or add other materials to make them fly even higher. The kites flew nicely today so it will be a challenge to improve them! The kids had so much fun with this task and they were just beaming when their kites took flight

Our Visit to Lincoln Park Care Center

Over the holidays we took a trip to sing to the residents at the Lincoln Park Care Center.
Here are two snapshots:

Moldy Apple

 A recent discovery of a snack that was left in someone's desk for far too long has led to our latest science experiment! We found this bag of moldy apples and have begun our exploration on mold and compost. We are all writing our own interpretation of the process in our “One Moldy Apple Ruins the Whole Bunch” book and are scientifically charting their decomposition on a whole class chart. More pictures to come. 

Looking at a sample of moldy apple compared to a piece of fresh apple:

Writing our apple books: