During community writing, we created a chart about the settings of stories. We brainstormed a list of places we could go where stories would take place. Next we used Kid Pix to draw our settings.

After reading Freight Train by Donald Crews, we created our own train in the hallway. As we painted our train cars, we used sponges to smear the ends of our cars to create the look of "speed" just like Donald! We added onomatopoeia to remind our viewers of the sounds trains make. Choo Choo! Click Clack, Click Clack! Toot, Toot!

With our study of mental images, we read the book Birds by Kevin Henkes. After reading Birds, we sketched our mental images on sticky notes. Later, we each had a chance to fancy up our mental images by using the tools on artpad.com. The slide show below shares our thinking! I added a link to artpad on the left side of the blog in case these budding artists want to do some more creating at home.

Birds by Kevin Henkes - Our Mental Images on PhotoPeach

Miss Lundgren helped us learn many new penguin facts. Here are some of our favorite ones!

Will you be my Valentine, my Valentine, my Valentine?
Will you be my Valentine, my Valentine today?

The past few weeks we have been reading and writing about bears. Through books and websites we have become bear experts! We started with a chart stating all the things we already know about bears and then shared questions we still had. The video below shows some of the new facts we learned.

Ryder

listen to ‘Ryder’ on Audioboo