The Best Part of Me

Our inspiration for one of our writing projects

Learning to express yourself through writing has a process.
Before we began to write, we read the book that became our inspiration.
After a discussion about ideas we got into groups with like minded people.
To document our ideas in our group we completed a graphic organizer. It helped to organize and focus our writing.

Myla was organizing her thoughts on her hair while Owen decided to write about his feet

Our writing process continues, by thinking of 5 ideas to write about on our best part.

THEN, the writing begins........

Our first drafts led to the editing process which eventually became typed work. That is now bound in our class room as a book titled. The Best Part of Us.

The Grand Finale........The reading of the book.

Michael shares....

While our next readers showcase their illustrations.....

Myla  and Jana sit comfortably as they read to the audience.

Another successful day with our sharpened pencils, a blank sheet of paper, an open heart, and an expressive soul.......

Essential Question: How do writers express themselves?

Painting Number Stories

One quiet afternoon....... after days of talking about, working on, and writing number stories we decided to paint some......

Easel ready to capture story ideas....

Watercolors await their story tellers....

Four masterpieces on display

The Common Core Standard:
O.A.1 Use addition and subtraction within 20 to solve word problems involving situations of adding to, taking from, putting together, taking apart, and comparing, with unknowns in all positions, e.g., by using objects, drawings, and equations with a symbol for the unknown number to represent the problem.

Essential Question:

How do we solve addition and subtraction sentences to solve real world problems with and without concrete objects?

Thanksgiving Rules

To whet our appetite for our Thanksgiving feast and weekend festivities, we read Thanksgiving Rules 

and then discussed the main idea of eating a lot of food on Thanksgiving Day. Which is what Percy, the main character, did.  Here are a few of us at work, using the colors of fall to paint our fall harvest feast.

Enjoy three completed paintings of our artists' Thanksgiving Dinner.  Bon Appetit!

Essential Question: What is a main idea of a book?

Common Core Standard addressed - RL.1.3. Describe characters, settings, and major events in  story using key details.