Ask Me About Monday, May 18, 2015

Today we welcomed a new friend to our class.  We passed the talking fish, and today we told three special things about our family.  As part of our school social and emotional learning goal, we talked once again about peace.  We read The Peace Book, by Todd Parr.  We listened to the message of the book about peace, but studied the illustrations as well to identify Todd Parr's style of illustration.  We noticed the black outlines around everything in the picture, the bold colors, and the unusual colors for hair and skin in the book.  We used Todd Parr's style and created our own statement about what is peace to us.  We sketched first with pencil, then used black marker to make our page look like a coloring book, then we chose bright colors to fill-in our pictures.  
Today we worked more with poetry.  We began revising some poems, as well as creating new poems.  We paid special attention to the beginning and ending of our short poems.  We continued to choose our words carefully; we also go back and choose different words to try out and see how it sounds.  Our poetry papers are our messy copies because just as authors do, we revise often as we write.  
Today we visited our state of Maryland as we read across the United States.  We read Aunt Flossie's Hats (And Crab Cakes Later), by by Elizabeth Fitzgerald Howard. Your children insisted it should be cheesecake instead of crab cakes, but since the story is set in Baltimore, I insisted it remain crab cakes.  Of course now I need cheesecake for dinner!   The story is of two little girls who go to visit their aunt and try on her old hats.  Each hat has a memory behind it.  Aunt Flossie tells the girls the stories, even though they have heard them before!  The hats are a keepsake that help tell the story of this family.  Ask me to tell you about Aunt Flossie's memories.
We toured our beautiful state to from the beautiful mountains of western Maryland to the majestic Chesapeake Bay.  We saw farmlands, cities, our beautiful capital of Annapolis, and the rich history our state holds with sites such as Fort McHenry. Several of our classmates are ready to head up to Keyser's Ridge and look at the beautiful scenery of the mountains in western Maryland!
 
Have a peaceful evening!
Juliet