Room 26 News

UNDER THE SEA..

In room 1-26 we are, indeed under the sea! Bubbles hang from the ceiling. A swordfish swims in the doorway. Sea shells, coral, and starfish are on display in the Science Center. The whale unit has begun!

We’ve kicked off this unit with the story of Jonah and the whale. What fun we are having with this great Bible story! We saw the story on the flannelboard Monday with a special twist. I have a whale puppet with a secret compartment in his jaw. The children watched the whale "swallow" the little stuffed Jonah, then spit him out at the end of the story. They are allowed to play with it and reenact the story at the Prayer Corner. They are also using our most popular computer software, the Veggie Tales Jonah game. We even have the VT pirate ship and a game of Jonah Go Fish for the children to play with. We’ve read various versions of the story in reading group which the children have understood very well.

The books we are reading are fantastic! We’ve done quite a bit of mixing up for reading group and are reading some pretty challenging fiction and non-fiction books. We’re enjoying a big book about coral reefs at the Reading Corner, and we’ve loved The Magic School Bus Under the Ocean and Extremely Weird Sea Creatures at story time. With our fiction books we are focusing on story elements such as characters, setting, and plot; with our non-fiction books we are locating information, getting details, and make connections to prior knowledge. I can hardly believe what the children are able to read and understand!

Most of our center projects are themed around Jonah or underwater animals. At the Science Center we’ve set up a "touching station" with various shells, coral, and starfish for the children to touch and explore. The Magic School Bus Whale and Dolphin Activity Center has shown the children about the two kinds of whales, toothed and baleen, and shown what each kind eats. We’ve learned from The Wild Whale Watch that each species of whale has distinctive flukes, and we did a matching paper that connected the whale with his corresponding flukes.

At the Publishing Center we wrote some whale facts onto dark blue, whale-shaped paper which we bound into a class book. We also followed written and pictorial directions to construct an origami whale out of a square of blue paper. And we made the glittery bubbles that adorn our room.

At the Math Center we’ve enjoyed Splish Splash Math, very challenging math software that has drippy water faucets as its theme. The children seemed to enjoy the challenge and did well with it. They also completed a lobster dot-to-dot which explored counting by 2s and used all double-digit numbers.

At the Reading Corner, I’ve made a little submarine out of one of Claire’s old science projects. The children love to sit inside it and read books about sea life. They are also enjoying sounding out words on virtual fish, whales, and manta rays in An Ocean Adventure.

Friday was such a great day for the children! In the morning we fingerpainted an ocean background for the tissue paper fish we made at the Prayer Corner. In the afternoon we watched the Veggie Tales Jonah movie while eating cheese twisties and drinking root beer. (If you’ve seen the movie, you understand.) What a great movie! The story of Jonah, you know, is very timely for Lent and is in fact read in church during Lent every year. The Veggie Tales version, in addition to stressing Jonah’s repentance and obedience to God, also develops the themes of mercy and compassion. These are great things for first graders to learn, and we had some terrific discussions about the movie afterwards.

We are focusing quite a bit on Lent in religion right now. The highlight of our week was going to church and saying the stations of the cross with our class. I wish you could have all been there! The children were shocked to silence to learn of the sufferings their beloved Jesus had to endure. We walked around church, looking at each picture, while I told the children everything I could think of about each station. They read a prayer from a little Stations booklet we assembled. It was a really beautiful experience with the sweeties.

We also did one more Mystery of Light on the flannelboard this week. This one is the hardest to tell an actual story about, but the children did well listening and completing the page in their booklet.

In math we continue to count money. It is working great to have the little bags of coins you sent in. We are naming the coins, telling their value, and counting dimes, nickels, and pennies in combination. This week we have begun to show the same amount of money in different coin combinations. The children must "buy" their cereal in math groups by counting out the specified amount of money.

We are also working on problem-solving quite a bit. We did a great lesson this week that went along with Hansel and Gretel as part of our fairy-tale-problem-solving unit. We are having great success adding and subtracting 2-digit numbers. I feel very good about the children’s progress in math.

The ice cream scoops continue to grow! We are very close to having everyone read 100 books. What an accomplishment that would be! Encourage your sweetie to keep going even if their personal goals have been met. Who knows what other prizes might end up appearing?

Have a great weekend! I will be chained to the computer, Turbo-Taxing the rest of the Ensley taxes and FAFSAs. This is a busy time of year for those of us with college students!

Mrs. E