Ask Me About Monday, January 9, 2017

Today we read another poem with short and long i words in it.  We talked about silent e on the end of words as a clue that the vowel that comes before the e is usually a long vowel.  We read the poem then sorted words with long and short i.  The poem was about penguins, so we took a few minutes to learn about baby penguins.  We saw baby penguins hatching from their eggs, being kept warm on their father's feet and under their feathers.  We also found out that the father penguins waddle over to other penguin dads to show off the baby.  The father penguin lifts up it's stomach and stretches it's strong feet/flippers out to present the baby to other fathers.  The baby penguin makes a lot of noise which encourages the other eggs to hatch, which is why most of the penguins are born around the same time.  The mothers return shortly after that, having been on a two month trip to eat food.  The baby reluctantly at first, goes to the mother so the father's can feed the babies better, and eventually go get more food for themselves.  I was fascintated, as you probably can tell!  Ask me to tell you what penguins do when they toboggan.  
In Writing Workshop today we read Click, Clack, Moo, Cows that Type, by Doreen Cronin.  This author uses interesting words and sounds to help the reader understand the story better.  We talked about several words from the text.  We learned what it means to strike. We also learned about the words impossible and impatient and talked about what "im" at the beginning of words means.  We talked about the words furious and deamnd and thought of other words that mean about the same thing.  Ask me to tell you how the story ends.  Today in our writing, we tried to use interesting words that would help our readers understand our stories better.  Word choice is important and it shows students are taking intellectual risks to write more difficult words.
We continued on our journey reading across America.  Today we visited California.  We read the book The Camping Trip that Changed America, by Barb Rosenstock.  This book is about how Teddy Roosevelt was inspired to create the National Parks, National Forests, and wildlife sanctuaries.  Here's a peek into this great book!

Have a nice evening!
​Miss Wolfe