Ask Me About Friday, October 23, 2015

Today we listened to The Storm Book, by Charlotte Zolotow.  This book is unique because it has pages of text, then two pages of pictures.  We listened to the words and practiced visualizing by making a little movie in our head of what we heard.  We listened to the beautiful language of the book that describes so elegantly an approaching storm and the beautiful rainbow at the end.  We drew pictures of a storm too, using details and colors to show a storm.  
We took a different kind of Brain Break today.  We started to learn about yoga. We read I Am Yoga, by Susan Verde, and artwork by Peter Reynolds.  I highly recommend this book for your family collection.  This book gently describes how we can take time away from the everyday stresses and use yoga to calm our mind. Ask me what I can tell my wiggling body, my thinking mind, and my racing breath..
We practiced sitting quietly, thinking of a peaceful place, and breathing.  We will continue to work with yoga and other mindfulness exercises throughout the year and use them in the classroom on a regular basis.  
We learned more about leaders today.  Yesterday we started a classroom book about how presidents are leaders.  We studied photographs of President Obama at work and analyzed them to help learn about what the leader of the United States does.  We made many connections to the photographs we saw to our own lives.  We can be leaders to in our class.  Yesterday we wrote about what we learned from the pictures in our book. We did some revising today to make sure our ideas were written to say what we learned about being a leader.  Here is our book.  Ask me to tell you about what I know about being a leader from analyzing these photographs.

In math, we continued to work with measurement.  We used our Cuisenaire rods to play a lotto game. We each had one set of the rods.  Each size of rod is a different color.  First, we put the rods in order from shortest to tallest.  Then we matched rods to spaces on a small puzzle card by looking at them.  Next week, we will play the game again, but this time we will put the rods in a bag and choose rods we think we need by touch.  This will be more challenging, and a lot of fun!

I would like to pass on compliments I have been hearing about our class.  Several teachers have commented how polite this group is, and yesterday two different teachers at different times commented on how sweet this group is.  Thank-you for sending me these happy little people every day!

Have a great weekend!
​Juliet