Language Arts 

Rosie’s Walk 

Recently the students listened to the story Rosie’s Walk by Pat Hutchins. This story leant itself to our current exploration of map making. In the story, Rosie goes on a walk traveling passed, through, around and across many different obstacles. After reading the story, the children decided to create new places for Rosie to travel.  In blocks, each team built and illustrated their own part of the journey and then they found ways to connect all the parts. All of the students' illustrations were then brought together to create a map for Rosie. During reflection and sharing, builders talked about their work and explained their part of the map to the class. Rosie has traveled to many places. Where will she go next?

  

  

  

    

This week, the students created a mural of places that Rosie could travel. Later, they used black sticks to arrange and plan individual works before they used ink and cardboard to create their final paintings.

  

 

Jonathan and His Mommy 

The picture book, Jonathan and his Mommy, by Irene Smalls is a delightful story about a young boy who explores his neighborhood in the city with his mother.  Together they have fun walking all sorts of ways including: “giant steps”, “itsy-bitsy steps”, “ballerina twirling steps” and “crazy criss-cross steps”.   To help the children connect with the text, we tried moving in the same ways as the characters.  In addition, the students invented some of their own ways to get from one place to another.   

The next time we read the story, the children brainstormed places they like to go with their mothers and created those places using blocks.  Together we labeled the structures and practiced moving in different ways around our giant map! 

  

 

As a continuation of our study of maps, the children have been experimenting with map making throughout the school. Here the students collected data for a new map of our playground. Students made drawings, gave dictations and took photographs of different parts of our school playground as part of the first stages of our map making.

Nature’s Treasures 

After spending lots of time collecting treasures from Pebble Path and closely observing trees, the children in Ms. Einbender’s class became fascinated by the furry gray animals scampering from branch to branch.  Their curiosity and questions led us down a new path: a study of squirrels! 

The children were delighted when Squirrely the puppet came to visit the class and talk about his cousins. 

  

What happens when you mix black and white?  You make gray squirrels! 

  

 

 

Imagine that your dinner has been buried for several months in the ground and you have to find it using only your sense of smell!  That’s what the children imagined when they tried to identify which bag had the acorns in it using only their noses! 

As part of the morning message, children made predictions about what they might find hiding in the dirt of our playground.  Then we took our shovels outside and dug lots of holes.  It was quite exciting to find such buried treasures as worms, centipedes and tree roots!