The week in review. . .

This week I have been showered with an abundance of hugs, cards, and things from my "favorite things" list!  

I am so appreciative of supportive and caring families.  I love these cards because they have have such sweet little messages inside...

We worked on cause and effect this week, and did a lot of great activities.  Here are some cards that we sorted as I introduced "cause and effect."    

Cause and Effect Mini Unit

 We also worked on two prefixes (re and un).  Here are a few books that worked wonderfully with the lessons.

We used dictionaries for a vocabulary activity.  Students worked in pairs and small groups to write their own definition, write the dictionary definition, write the word in a sentence, and illustrate the word.  I used words with basic prefixes such as:  words recycle, impossible, unkind, unhappy, return, review, and prehistoric.  

Vocabulary Connection

We worked on our own class book of "fortunate" and "unfortunate" events. This connected to cause and effect really well, and the students had a great time thinking about their own life experiences.

 We've been writing lots of poetry lately and have begun working on a "poe" tree display in the hall.

I love this book because it's full of great poems about all sorts of things.

 So far we have learned about the couplet, cinquain, and limmerick.  Next week we'll learn about several others.  When we're done, we'll have a giant "tree map" with 7 different kinds of poems, an example that we've written as a class, and their characteristics.  I know that April is poetry month, but our scope and sequence has poetry near the end of the school year.  Even though we work on poetry all throughout the year with our poetry notebooks, rhyming words, syllables, and other word work activities that are poetry related, we really focus on the different types of poetry and their elements during the final six weeks of school.

 

The Mother's Day gifts turned out great, and we put the final touches on them today.  Hopefully the students will remember to shower their mom's with hugs, kisses, and presents this weekend!

To end our week we celebrated "Cinco de Mayo" (better late than never) with some fun literature and a small taste test!

The kids did a wonderful job using this triple venn diagram. 

Have a great weekend and Happy Mother's Day to all the hard working momma's out there.  I'm heading out of town to hang out with my three handsome men and to surprise my mom and grandmother!