Ask Me About Thursday, May 14, 2015

Today we welcomed a new student from California.  You would be so proud of the way the children welcomed him to our room and the way they helped him out all day! I did more testing today, and am except for a few little bits I may need to do, we're done with the reading testing.  Our schedule will get back to normal!  We watched a short part of Reading Rainbow that featured the book Show Way, by Jacqueline Woodson. The story is about a quilt that was made by six generations with clues to follow to escape slavery of the south and move to the north.  We talked about how families have special things they keep and pass along to younger family members. These special keepsakes help tell the story of the family. 
We also read Wangari's Trees of Peace, by Jeanette Winter.  This book is about Wangari Maathai, and her work to reforest Kenya after so many trees were cut down.  She started with six trees, and encouraged other women to plant trees.  As word spread about women reforesting Kenya, more and more women joined in and thirty million trees were planted.  In 2004, Wangari Maathai won the Nobel Peace Prize for her work with the Green Belt Movement. 
Today we also studied some very simple poetry to see how it is different than writing a story or report.  Tomorrow the students will begin writing poems of their own..  In math, we talked about tens and some more ones.  We were able to move quickly to more tens because this is a topic we worked with earlier and the children have a good understanding of the concept.  
We ended our day with a visit to South Carolina.  This was very exciting since many of the children have visited South Carolina.  We looked at the mountains, the coast, and Charleston.  We also took a peek at Fort Sumter and talked about cannons and the start of the Civil War very briefly.  Then, we read the book This Is the Rope, which is also by Jacqueline Woodson.  This book is about a very ordinary piece of rope that became a family keepsake because of the journey it took with a family as they migrated from South Carolina to New York City.