Ask Me About Tuesday, April 18, 2016

I hope everyone had a wonderful Spring Break and spent time with family and friends!  It's good to be back!

We had a great first day back after Spring Break.  The kids came in eager to tell stories of their break, so we passed the Talking Fish and listened to everyone's adventures.  Then the kids wrote and illustrated postcards about their spring break. After they finished the writing, we listened to about six of the postcards and talked about what they needed to fix, finish, revise or edit.  Some of the kids needed to edit to include punctuation.  This is still something children are learning and is difficult when they begin writing longer pieces.  Some children needed to revise more and add more detail to their writing.  I wanted to hang these in the hall but the children wanted to bring them home.  We are compromising and I will scan them tonight at home and add them to our website.  
We had a bus evacuation drill today.  This is something that we do twice a year with different ways of exiting the bus are shown to the children.  They were so respectful listening to the bus driver and patrols!  
We did a quick pre-test to see if children were able to use ordinal numbers.  I usually have the children use eggs that register on the Promethean Board, but we have some that need batteries replaced, so we used sign language for the letters a, b, c and d.  Ask me to show you how to sign a, b, c and d!  They seem to have a good understand of ordinal numbers, but we will do a few things to practice over the next week just to be sure!  

In Social Studies we started a new unit about life long ago.  We talked about the word history and what that means.  I asked the children how life has changed through time.  This group amazes me everyday, and today was no exception.  The responses from the children are in red, I added the words in parentheses.  We talked about how far back history goes and watched a couple short clips from Brain Pop Jr. about ancient China and Egypt.  Then we watched part of Reading Rainbow to listen to Ox Cart Man, by Donald Hall.  This book is about life in New England in the 1800's.  Most of our study will be about life in America.  This week the focus is on toys!  My little friends were very happy to hear that, and we will have time Thursday and Friday to play with some toys from the past.  
Usually we have a field trip to Rose Hill Manor in Frederick.  This year we were unable to get this trip scheduled when we are studying life long ago, so I'm going to just mention it to you.  You might consider going to Rose Hill Manor sometime with your family if you are looking for something to do on the weekend.  There are several parts to area, and I've never gone to the farm part of it, but they have a manor house that is fun for the kids to visit.  It is geared toward children, so there are hands-on things for the kids to do.  There is a cabin on the property too which the children usually love going in!  There is also an ice house, a carriage museum and the farm museum.  Here's a link to information about Rose Hill.  
http://md-frederickcountyparks.civicplus.com/404/Rose-Hill-Manor-Park-Museums

​Have a nice evening!
​Miss Wolfe