The Easter Bunny's Assistant

Today we read a story called "The Easter Bunny's Assistant" by JanThomas.  It was about the Easter bunny and his assistant, Skunk.  The Easter Bunny was busy making Easter eggs, but every time the Skunk got excited, he made a stink!!  We thought this book funny.  We made our own recipe book about how to make our own Easter eggs.  Here are the steps:

Step One:  Boil the eggs
Step Two:  Make the dye
Step Three: Draw the crayon on the eggs
Step Four: Look for skunks and get rid of them!!
Step Five:  Dye the eggs.

We will be bringing home our recipe books tomorrow to share with you.

Munsch, Munsch, and More Munsch!

We have been studying author Robert Munsch.  In our study, we have learned that Robert Munsch's is known for three key components in his stories.  First, he uses a lot of noise words in his stories.  This makes his stories come to life and makes you feel like you are really in the story yourself.  Secondly, he stretches out and exaggerates a lot of his words.  Lastly, his stories are usually about a real child.  We have enjoyed reading many stories.  We have had many laughs.

Check out Robert Munsch's website:  http://robertmunsch.com/

Oh...and he is also Canadian!!

Addition Fun!

Today, we continued our work on addition.  We have been practicing addition using a variety of hands-on strategies including counters, building tower blocks with cubes, our fingers, and drawing pictures.  We are now learning about mental math strategies--that is ways we can solve questions in our head.  Today we learned the add one more strategy.  This strategy works for questions such as 4 + 1.  We learned that we don't need counters or our fingers.  We can just count up one from 4 in our head.  We had fun practicing this by playing a game with a deck of regular playing cards.  It is called Add One memory.  It is played just like regular memory, except instead of finding an identical  matching pair like a 4 and a 4, you have to match by finding the card that is one more.  For example if you turned over a 6 first, your matching pair would be a 7.  Try it at home.