Red Clover Books!

This month we will be reading the Red Clover Book nominees. These ten books are chosen by a group of Vermont teachers and librarians across the state.  All children in grades K-3 read the books throughout the year and then vote for their favorite book in April.  We read two of the books this week: The Bad Seed and Chef Roy Choi and the Street Food Remix.  After reading each story, we discussed the book and then completed a project.  In The Bad Seed, the main character is a sunflower seed and he considers himself a "bad seed", never doing anything kind or nice.  However, by the end he turns into a good seed.  Each child made their own seed and shared something they do to be a good seed!  We have good seeds who help friends, say kind words, and clean up. Our good seeds are displayed outside the classroom!  They are pretty cute!  Our second book was about a chef named Roy Choi who started his own line of food trucks in Los Angeles.  He mixed his Korean food heritage with a taco truck...a street food remix!  After reading this story and talking about the food he made for his food truck, the children made their own food truck menus!  We are putting these menus in our classroom kitchen to use during Choice Time.  What was on your child's menu?

During Reader's Workshop, we continued to strengthen are reading powers!  We talked about how readers re-read books to become more fluent in their reading.  We looked for patterns in the words of our emergent reader books and practiced reading those smoothly.  We also began to notice punctuation in our books and noticed how that helps us read the book.  We found exclamation points and question marks and changed the tone of our voices to match the punctuation.

In math this week, we turned our attention to measurement and comparing numbers (greater than and less than).  We spent much of our math time using popsicle sticks and unifix cubes to measure the length of items in the classroom. Then we compared those numbers and talked about which were greater and which were less.  We also learned about the  <, >, and = signs that mathematicians use to compare numbers! Ask your child to tell you about the "shark mouth"!  Next week, we will work with coins: nickels, dimes, and pennies.

During Writer's Workshop, we continued to write our personal narratives with a beginning, middle, and end.  The children are continuing to tell their stories with detailed illustrations, but also adding more sentences.  I am so impressed with their work!  Our big focus for the week was putting spaces between our words.  This helps the reader better understand our stories! 

We finished learning all of our lowercase letters and sounds last week in Fundations.  Now we are moving on to spelling and tapping out C-V-C words, such as map, cat, sit, etc.  For each letter in a word we tap a finger on our thumb and then "zip" the sounds together to say the word.  See if your child can tap out a word for you!  This knowledge will help with their reading and also their "best guess" spelling in Writer's Workshop.

Have a great weekend! Stay warm!