Birthdays and Books

After a delicious weekend of consuming way too much turkey, I returned to school and celebrated my big 25^th birthday with my class. I swear to you, they were more excited about my birthday than I was! Some of them even got me gifts and made me adorable cards. I truly have the most thoughtful students in the world.

 (The One Direction book was only for me to borrow. I had to give it back the next day, hahaha!)

The only downside to having different celebrations at school is that you are bound to have one or two kids that feel bad for not getting you anything. This is common at Christmas and at the end of the year. I was shocked enough that my birthday turned into such a big to do, so I hadn’t prepared myself for this issue. I always answer with this: “The best gift I could get is being with you on my birthday”. And it’s absolutely true. It’s something I say with a lot of truth behind it. It has been a long time since I’ve been at school on my actual birthday and I had a blast celebrating with 26 of my favourite people.

Moving on. Last time I wrote I said I’d share our new units; so here goes:

Math

We are starting a unit on patterning and we are using the context of a theme park. So far, we’ve been working with number pattern questions where we start at a number (76) and jump up by tens. We also started looking at a table of values and noticing patterns among the terms. Next week, we’ll kick it up a notch.

Literacy

We are starting a unit on-well many things, but there’s a big focus on mood. The read aloud I chose to use for this unit is James and the Giant Peach. As much as I love picture books, I was excited to start a novel. Looking back at last year, I read The BFG (same author) just as a transition activity and the kids loved it. It’s a great way to teach foreshadowing and inferring, which are two other biggies we’re trying to teach in this unit.

I want the students to understand the elements of a story, so the first day we looked at characters. We were first introduced to James, Aunt Spiker, and Aunt Sponge. The task was to draw a character and around the drawing, write down as many adjectives as you could think of to describe that character.

So now I need to tell you about Aunt Sponge. The book says she’s extremely fat; so fat, in fact that her shirt doesn’t even go all the way down and her belly sticks out. One of my threes decided to draw this character and this is what he drew:

Me: “Um, is that her bathing suit?”

Boy: “No, it’s her bra!”

Me: “Why did you draw that? I don’t remember that part in the book.”

Boy: “It says her shirt doesn’t go all the way down.”

I definitely had a good laugh. I hope you did too :)