As the end of the school year is fast approaching, we have begun talking about it more in the classroom. To link to our current theme of Eric Carle, we read one of Eric Carle’s books, A Home for Hermit Crab. In this story, the hermit crab finds a shell to live in. As the story goes on he makes various friends that help him decorate his shell. Finally, the time comes when he is too large and has outgrown his shell. A new, smaller hermit crab, moves in while the big hermit crab finds a new shell. We related this book to us “out-growing” our classroom, and it is time to move on. We are all mixed with emotions of excitement, sadness, and even some anxiety about a new situation.

We are going to be spending the last few days of school busy at work….. and play! To explain the “play” part, we have several exciting events coming up. Every family should have received an outline explaining our walking field trips, field day, cookie party, and sports day. However, tucked into all this excitement, we still have a lot of learning going on.

In writer’s workshop, we have continued to work on our fiction stories. Each student has their own personal word list that they use during writer’s workshop. This is a list of words that the child is ready to spell correctly in their work. They refer to this list often during their writing. Words get added to the list as students often use them and may spell them incorrectly. This helps the children to not only read many more high frequency words, but to spell them accurately as well.

We have several focuses in math at this point in the school year. This week we have been playing a telling time bingo game. Students are matching the digital with the analog clock. They are working on time to the hour and half hour. We have also been playing many games with pennies, nickels and dimes. Students have been using real coins and stamps to explore with money. We also do activities to create a certain amount of money using different varieties of coins.

In the afternoon, we finished the book Charlotte’s Web. Then we jumped right into reading Stuart Little. The children are fascinated with the exciting life and silly situations the tiny little Stuart gets himself into. They really enjoy this time of the day when we all relax on carpet and listen to a chapter of the story. Most children lay down and just listen, while others sit as close to me as possible and try to follow along with the words as I read.

The baby chicks are growing more rapidly than ever! We should have them in our classroom for at least another week. We are just having too much fun with the chicks! We get them out at least once a day to hold them and make observations about their movements. We have compared them to toddlers this week as they have become much more active!