P.D. Eastman Kindergarten Celebration

We have been exploring P.D. Eastman over the last few weeks in kindergarten. My hope is that students who are emerging readers will be familiar with good, fun,  and readable options as they enter first grade. Last year, I separated "easy readers" from the rest of the picture books. I let first graders know about this section during the first week of school so they know where to find books that will help their reading skills blossom. So, this year, we are ending with a P.D. Eastman celebration as a segue into first grade. We have read the following books either written, illustrated, or both by P.D. Eastman:
Go Dog Go
Sam and the Firefly
The Best Nest
Flap Your Wings
Fish Out of Water
Are You My Mother

For our final celebration, we made party hats reminiscent of Go Dog Go's party hats that appear throughout the book. My favorite line from the book, "Hello again, and now do you like my hat?" "I do! What a hat! I like it. I like that party hat."

Since three out of the six books we read have a bird theme, we will have a spoon and egg race.

Students will get "doggie bags" with a summer reading list, and some writing supplies.

And finally, P.D. Eastman cowrote the screenplay for the 1951 Oscar winner for Best Animated Short Subject film, Gerald McBoing-Boing. Students will watch this 7 minute film originally written by Dr. Seuss.

Life as a Kid Infographics

Fourth graders finished up and presented their Easel.ly infographics which compared life as a kid in the United States with life as a kid in another country. Students gathered their information from CultureGrams, filled in a Venn diagram graphic organizer, and then transferred the information to Easel.ly to create an online infographic. See below for some examples.


easel.ly


easel.ly


easel.ly

Prelutsky Multimedia Poems

Second graders explored Jack Prelutsky poems in library several ways this spring. I already posted about our haiku riddles and Scranimal poems. As our final project to our Prelutsky poetry unit, we created a multimedia version of poems that we had originally read reader's theater style. Students were given one or two lines of poetry and illustrated their part. We recorded the audio in class using PhotoStory. Watch the poems below.






Mrs. Silveira's class

Mrs. Macnie's class

Mrs. Paiva

Scranimals in Second Grade

Students in second grade have been exploring Jack Prelutsky's poetry. Recently we read Scranimals which explores the world of Scranimal Island and it's odd creatures. Creatures in the poetry collection are combinations of a plant and an animal. Students tried their hand at creating their own Scranimal. See examples below.

Pupshroom by Amanda

Oh, pupshroom your such a cutey,
With your big eyes and your beauty.
You might cry, you might moan,
But you will be on your own.
I love you, you love me,
And we are just meant to be.
Even though I might love you,
I will still always eat you.

Frapple by Jake

The Frapple sits by the water
Of an apple, of a frog
It looks so tastey
I so want to eat it
Bye bye frog
I'm going to eat you
Oh no! He got away.

Pancakes for Breakfast in First Grade

First graders practiced retelling stories with the wordless picture book Pancakes for Breakfast by Tomie DePaola. We read the story together as a class and then each student narrated a page from the book to create our own class version of the story. We recorded the narration via Vocaroo and I put the voice to the pictures using iMovie.  Students also filled out graphic organizers to retell the story in four parts using both words and pictures.Watch our versions of Pancakes for Breakfast below:

Mrs. MacDonald's class

Mrs. Forget's class

Mrs. Milhomens class

Biography Puppet Interviews in 3rd Grade

Third graders have finished their biography puppet interviews. Students worked in groups of two and three to research a famous person, created a puppet version of the person in art and then did an interview-style puppet show with the information they gathered. Below are a few samples of our work. To see all of the puppet shows, visit our SchoolTube channel and search by keywords, "biography puppets & your teacher's last name:
biography puppets & Monteiro
biography puppets & D'Ambra
biography puppets & Brun

Albert Einstein

Neil Armstrong

Gabby Douglas

Harry Houdini

Christopher Paul Curtis
 

Hilary Clinton



Here is the list of people researched:

Monteiro Helen Keller Chief Joseph Gabby Douglas Neil Armstrong Steve Jobs Roberto Clemente Charles Drew Ella Fitzgerald

Brun Albert Einstein Harry Houdini Christopher Paul Curtis Jeff Gordon Georgia Okeefe Althea Gibson Sacagawea Barbara Park

D’Ambra Louis Armstrong George Lucas Hillary Clinton Wilma Rudolph Grace Lin Sally Ride Snowflake Bentley

Find out how this fits in with Common Core Standards and library standards here >>

If Not for the Cat: Haiku Riddles

Students in Miss Edwards and Mrs. McKinnon's classes experimented with haiku riddles after reading Jack Prelutsky's If Not for the Cat. The book has 17 haiku that form a riddle about a certain animal. Haiku is a form of Japanese poetry with 17 total syllables about the natural world. The poem is broken into three lines with 5 syllables on the first line, 7 syllables on the second line and 5 syllables on the third line. Can you guess the students' haiku riddle?


It lays eggs on land.
It's body has a hard shell.
It loves to swim slow.

Answer: A turtle

Snow comes from the sky.
It's cold and makes people sick.
It's white everywhere.

Answer: winter

It's black and yellow.
They can fly around outside.
They can be sneaky.

Answer: a bee