For the past couple of weeks, Laura's class has been studying the author Mem Fox. Mem is from Australia and uses native animals in her books as characters. So naturally we have been learning about the geography of Australia and several native animals like the emu, wombat, koala, and dingo to name a few. This week we read Possum Magic together and did a couple of extension activities. In the book, Grandma Poss has magical powers and uses one on Hush, her grand possum baby making her invisible. Grandma Poss has to find a cure to make Hush visible again and they go all around Australia looking for it with different ingredients. We picked our favorite native animal and created a magic power for them. Then we illustrated the powers and wrote a caption for each. We also created a magic potion that made our power possible with different ingredients, like koala toenails, emu feathers, and kangaroo boogers. We have one more week with Mem then it's on to another author.
In math we have been learning to skip count by 2's! We did a sorting activity, sang songs, found all kinds of patterns using the 100's chart, wrote numbers in our journals, and made a tall stack of ice cream scoops illustrating 2 through 20. Next week is 5's!
Caitlin's class launched writers workshop this week! They have two class lesson days devoted to writing workshop and have come up with several ideas. One of them is a 9th street school newspaper with articles, interviews, and photographs completely composed by the students. They spent some time decorating their notebooks, getting ready to write write write!
