Transit of Venus

I talked with the class today about this unique event that will happen around sunset our time.  We watched a short video on the NASA website that explained what would happen.  We were astounding at how small a planet, something we always picture as being so HUGE, looked compared to the sun.  It really puts the sheer magnitude of the sun's size into perspective when you see this tiny black dot passing in front of it.  We talked about how it reminded us of Horton and his speck.  Makes you think....

Here is a link to NASA's website if you want to view this historic event with their special equipment.  Unfortunately the weather here is not going to be ideal for viewing it in person.  Thanks to Mr. Kerr for sharing information with us! 

Click on the link below to view
Transit of Venus

I'm a Pout Pout Fish...

I love the book The Pout-Pout Fish by Deborah L. Diesen.  It is one that Christopher and I love to read at bedtime.  He loves how the fish makes the "blub, bluuub, bluuuub" sounds.  I have to admit I have fun reading them too.  I used another one of D. Jump's lessons on this story.  She had a great directed drawing activity for showing the kids how to draw the pouty fish and the cheery fish.  We used the document camera and data projector to go step by step to draw them both.  They turned out so great!!!  We used watercolors to paint our fish.  The kids had a blast doing this.  We made connections to times we have been a little pouty (and we all have).  We wrote about what makes us pout and what makes us smile. 

We also read the follow up book The Pout-Pout Fish in the Big Big Dark.  This is another great story where the fish overcomes his fear of the dark to help out a friend. 

We loved this song that goes along with the story.  I promised I would include this so they could hear it at home.  Enjoy!  Warning!! It's one of those songs that you will catch yourself singing later because it is embedded in your brain. 

Oceans of fun

We read 2 more Eric Carle stories this week.  This time they had ocean animal characters.  The first was House for Hermit Crab.  We drew a hermit crab and drew all of his friends that he gathered to decorate his house.  This helped us to retell the story.  This is a perfect story for the end of the school year as it tells of a hermit crab who is leaving the security of something familiar for the vast unknown.  

 We also read Mr.Seahorse.  This follows a father seahorse as he makes his way through the ocean meeting other busy fathers.  We decorated seahorses to go along with the story. 

We have spent most of the week learning about different sea animals.  My batteries died on my camera so I did not get to take all of the pictures that I wanted to.  :-(  I will try to get some more posted this week.  Here are a few things we did together. 



Aargh..pirates

I have so been looking forward to doing  a pirate unit this year!!  I am a pirate after all... (Go ECU!!) I am planning on using a pirate theme when setting up my classroom next year, so this unit gave me lots of great ideas.  I purchased Deanna Jump's Pirate unit on TpT (click here to see).  It had some great activities!  We started by reading about pirates and creating a circle map of everything we knew about pirates. 

We learned how to talk like a pirate as well.  This really helped us with the /ar/ sound like in "car".  We used our circle map to write about pirates. 

In math, we created pirates using a glyph (responses determine how pirate looks). Here are a few samples.  How stinkin' cute are these guys??? 

We learned how to draw pirates using lots of details!  I was amazed!!

We read How I Became a Pirate and Pirates Don't Change Diapers by Malinda Long.  I love both of these stories.  They were illustrated by another one of my favs...David Shannon.  We used a thinking map to plan writing for what we would do if we became a pirate. 

We also learned how to draw a pirate ship. 

And we made our own treasure maps...



We played an addition game in math.  Each person took turns rolling 2 die and finding their sum.  Each sum was recorded and part of a pirate ship was drawn. The first person to draw entire ship won. 

We made predictions as to why we think some pirates wore eye patches.  I was very impressed with the responses. One was to keep their parrots from pecking them in the eye.  Too cute!  Most thought it was due to an injury or to simply protect their eyes.  Other responses centered around the eye patch being part of the "uniform".  It was actually pretty cool to learn one of the possible reasons.  Click on the photo below to view the response we found.

We made our own eye patches to go along.  

Here is our display in the hallway!  Thanks Ms. Schiffer as always!!