Lois Elhert, Measurement and Maps!

Last week we studied Lois Elhert, a wonderful author/illustrator.  We read Mole's Hill, Growing Vegetable Soup, Hands, Top Cat, Oodles of Animals, Color Zoo, Rainbow Garden, and Wag a Tail.  In writing we wrote sentences after reading some of these books.  One day, we created an animal with foam shapes and wrote to describe our animal with shape and color words.  Two other days we drew a cats and dogs and wrote to describe with adjectives. Yesterday, we wrote about the amazing things our hands can do!  This week in math we started a unit on measurement.  We shared ideas of what kinds of things we can measure.  We measured items in our classroom with unifix cubes. We continued to work at our math zones to practice number concepts.  In social studies we began a unit on geography and studied maps and globes.  We know that a map key gives us important information to help us read a map.  We also began to study the continents and oceans.  We are working hard each week on word sorts.  Our first sort was plants and animals, the second was sorting animals by land, sea, and air.  This week we sorted fruits and vegetables!  Soon we will begin to sort pictures by beginning and ending sounds.  

Christopher was the star of the week!  He brought in some cool pictures of his family and a book about dinosaurs.  Thomas' mom came as the mystery reader this week and taught us all about cool ways animals use their external features like tails, noses, eyes, etc.