Ask Me About Monday, March 11, 2019

We had a very quiet day.  In fact, it was almost eerie it was so quiet.  Springing forward seems to have done a job on these little guys!
We had a visit from Dr. Chawla, Surina's mom, who is a pediatrician.  She told about her career, and what she does at her job.  We also saw some of the tools she uses at her office.  Friday, we had a visit from Audrey's dad who is also a doctor.  From what I can gather, from artifacts left and from the kids said, it has something to do with the lungs.  The children are learning so much from these visits, and I really appreciate the parents who have taken time out of their day to come visit.  It's a great way to start the day, so if anyone else would like to come in and talk about their job, we would love to have you!  
We had a visit from Mrs. Kanter today.  She also talked about careers.  She read a great book to the kids called When I Grow Up by "Weird Al:" Yankovic.  Here's a trailer that gives you a peek at the book, read by "Weird Al" himself!

On our Read Across America journey, we stopped off in Florida today.  I bet you are all thinking I read a book about Walt Disney or "The World" itself, but I practiced self control and read a powerful book about how humans change the environment and the habitats of plants and animals instead.  The book is called Everglades, by Jean Craighead George, and is beautifully illustrated by Wendell Minor.  The story is about a group of children who go on a canoe ride with a man who tells the story of the Everglades.  He starts at it's beginning, and tells how it evolved and it's plants and animals were prospering, and then the changes humans brought to the area, and how that changed life for those plants and animals.  The story ends with the man telling the children that they grew up and changed the Earth again by bringing back those animals and plants to the numbers once in the Everglades. Ask me to tell you about the plants and animals in the Everglades. 
We also read another book later in the day called Sam, the Sea Cow, by Francine Jacobs.  This is a story based on actual events.  We read this story not only because it is set in Florida, but because it has very short chapters that gave us a reminder that readers don't just start reading and race through the words, that they instead read, stop and think about the story or information they read.  At the end of each chapter, we came up with one major even from that part of the story.  At the end of the story we wrote about one event in several sentences and drew a quick sketch.  Ask me to tell you about the major events in Sam the Sea Cow.
Your child is bringing home baggie with tangrams.  We used the tangrams to create different shapes with more than one shape.  There is a little chart that tells how many pieces to use, and how many bunnies should be on the combined shapes.  This is a puzzle, so we worked on trying things in different ways to find the correct way to make the different shape.  Ask me to show you the tangram puzzle. 

Below I have a included the Reading Rainbow episode of Sam the Sea Cow.  We read the book, but I am sure the kids would love to see the whole show!  The show is about a half-hour, so I think this episode was recorded twice on YouTube, giving it a longer play time.  Anyway, enjoy!

Have a nice evening!
Miss Wolfe