Valentine Weeks!

We got our "lovey-dovey" on for two weeks this Valentine season.

PreK 3, 4, K, 1, 2

Little Mouse's Big Valentine, by Thatcher Hurd

Little Mouse searches for someone to give his huge Valentine to. In his journey, he meets Gloria, a girl mouse. Crush ensues, and we are all "awwww" when he offers the it (and his paw) to her.

We sang H-E-A-R-T to the tune of "Bingo" using flannel heart shapes to help us along. Students in grade 2 also scrambled the letters to see what other words we could find. (earth, hate, tar, hat, ear, and on and on!) I found the song via Pinterest (at the blog "My Delicious Ambiguity" here).

I showed kiddos how to make hearts by connecting two dots (up, over, down) and we practiced making good heart shapes with red, pink, and purple crayons, pencils, and markers. PreK 4 and up were able to do this. It's pretty hard for PreK 3!

PreK 3, 4, K, 1, 2

My Heart is Like a Zoo, by Michael Hall

We read this neat concept book that pairs similes about love with animals in a zoo. Each page shows an animal created out of heart shapes. The natural follow-up is to give students a chance to create their own animal creations with hearts cut from various colors.



Grade 3: Guiding Question - How many places can we find information about a topic?

As a culminating activity, each child chose a topic of interest and tried to find out information about it from each of the resources we've learned about: print and digital encyclopedias, books in the Dewey section, PebbleGo, and atlases.

They collected their facts in a flip book then shared what they learned. We set aside two sessions for this, but three or four would have been even better. Still, all students showed good understanding of the central idea: there are many places to look for information and some of them work for a topic better than others.

Grade 4 began a poetry terms unit. We created flip books for this as well. Here's the slideshow of definitions and examples we used. Next, we'll take time to explore many poetry books and find examples of how the terms are used in poems.