Picture Parade

Our classroom is filled with creative students, and we have been lucky enough to have a very creative parent come to our classroom once a week to teach our students about art through the Picture Parade program.  The students have learned about different types of art and artists.  They have been thinking about and discussing the art that is presented each week.  Most recently the class has been working on creating tightrope walkers.  Using a variety of materials, such as corks, wires, feathers, cups, pipe cleaners, screws, and bolts, the student have had the challenge of constructing a figure that is balanced in way to sit upright on a tightrope that is currently stretched across our classroom.  The students have certainly enjoyed using their hands to create their projects!  Feel free to stop in anytime to check out our tightrope walkers!

Leprechaun Day

The students at Lanesboro get pretty excited when St. Patrick's Day is near, and they go on watch for the Leprechaun.  A few special activities were added into our day to honor St. Patrick's Day.  Our morning meeting game was changed from "Doggy, Doggy Where's Your Bone?"  to "Leprechaun, Leprechaun Where's Your Gold?"  During math we used a Leprechaun's favorite cereal to sort and graph.  We also made a class book about what we would do if we caught a leprechaun.  We were lucky enough to have the leprechaun leave us a package in the office at the end of the day.  The leprechaun knows how much we love to read and brought each student a bookmark and a new Piggie and Elephant book for our class.

Special Guest

The students were so excited today for our special guest: TC Bear.  TC Bear from the Minnesota Twins joined us today to act out a story.  The story was about TC not being able to hit the baseball, and he needed to practice, practice, practice in order to become a better hitter.  At the end of the book, TC's hard work paid off when his hit earned his team a win! This can be related to our reading.  When we put in a lot of hard work and practice, we become great readers!

Batter Up For a Good Book

Today kicked off the events for "I Love to Read Week."  This year the activities are centered around a baseball theme, and today was baseball cap day.  It is a very fun treat for the students to be able to wear a favorite hat all day long.  The students also enjoyed tallying up our runs for reading throughout the day including an additional "RBI" time (Reading Books is Important).  Our reading runs will be recorded on our reading scoreboard.  We look forward to the events ahead!

Winter Authors' Celebration

Last Friday families joined us for our Winter Authors' Celebration.  During our daily read aloud we had read many circle stories like "If You Give a Pig a Pancake" by Laura Numeroff.  The students then wrote their own circle stories.  They were so creative in their characters and plot.  Some of the titles included "If You Give a Lion a Latte," "If You Give a Butterfly a Boomerang," and "If You Give a Squid a Sea Gull."  The stories were illustrated using crayon and water color.  The illustrations turned out wonderfully!  We also shared with our families a reading of "Olive My Love" by Vivian Walsh.  Thank you for all who attended!

Happy 100th Day of School

Today we celebrated our 100th day of school with several activities.  During math we compared the weight of sets of 100 objects.  The students then took a few of those items and measured how long 100 items were lined up.  We found that the popsicle sticks were the longest in a row and the paperclips lined up were the shortest.  The students were probably most looking forward to making a 100 day trail mix.  Each student brought in 100 snack items and we combined them all in a big bowl.  As they enjoyed their snack, they used the digits in 100 to make creative designs.  They could move the digits around to make them into whatever design they chose.  The students came up with wonderful ideas such as a mask, tractor, guitar, alligator, monster truck, eagle, and a classroom with a teacher and students.  We'll put all of our designs together in a class book.

Froggy Books

The students in first and second grade are crazy about a new series- Froggy books by Jonathan London!  We have been reading them during our read aloud for the last few weeks, and the students have enjoyed getting to know Froggy and predicting what he will do next.  We have learned that Froggy is often forgetful, clumsy, turns more red in the face than green in each story, and is very kind to his family and friends.  We had a few of these books in our classroom library, and after seeing how much the students love reading them I quickly added more!  During our Daily 5 reading block I see many students reading Froggy books to self or to a classmate.  I just love seeing students getting excited about a favorite series, or character, or author! "Froggy Goes to Hawaii" is going to be at our upcoming book fair, and we can't wait to get our hands on it!