We went into the book in Carlos and the Squash Plant.  One way to connect to the text is to visualize the events in the book as if watching a movie.  After reading and experiencing the sights, sounds and smells of Carlos’s home in the Espanola Valley in New Mexico, we went one step further.  What would it be like to be Carlos and have a squash plant growing out of your ear?  One student who tried it found he got angrier as the plant got longer, so his pictures are the link for the “Into the Book” link on the right.

"Carlos" is not happy about his ear!

Phonics: Correspondence between letters and sounds

One of the games we play to practice letter sounds is the “word sort“.   Students learn better to automatically recognize which letter patterns produce certain sounds if their spelling words contain at least two different patterns.  Then they need to listen carefully to each word and think about the patterns they have learned carefully.

Click below to see an example “The Sounds of O” and see if you can put each word into the correct dustbin according to the sound.  Please notice that this flash generated game does NOT have sound.  Students should be able to read the words, think about the sound and compare the sound without having the word pronounced for them.

Click here for full screen version

As of Friday, April 10 my class has donated 38,400 grains of rice by answering vocabulary questions.  In only one week my nine   students have played vocabulary games on Free Rice and earned 10 grains of rice for each correct answer.

If you are curious about exactly how much rice this is use the handy metric to American measurement conversion calculator.  We’ve earned  just under 5 1/2  pounds this week — enough to feed a person for more than 5  days .

When my  students add their efforts to those of thousands of people around the world, there were 40,588,030 grains of rice donated to the UN World Food program on April 10.

You can watch a video of students around the world playing Free Rice and the distribution of the food they earned.

Rainbow from www.pics4learning.com

Even though most students were a little bit nervous at first , all of them read their color poems aloud on the announcements this morning.

We watched and listened to color poems read by primary students in Britain .  Then we wrote several poems of our own in the same format.  Students chose their favorite color poem to read aloud and practiced it for fluency.

Our video celebrates the rainbow of poetry we created and the wonderful, talented poets in my class.

Do you have a poem in your pocket?  At my school you can win a prize during March if you are spotted in the hallway by the Poetry Patrol and you have a poem in your pocket.  You can literally produce a handwritten poem that has been stuffed in your pocket, but by the end of the month it may get a little tattered, especially if it has been accidentally placed in the wash a couple of times. So you can also recite a poem that you have memorized so there a lot of great links to poetry here.  And it’s a lot easier to memorize a poem that you have written, so there are links to that as well.