Today for “Fiesta Friday” (we had it on Thursday since there is no school Friday) we learned about different things you can make with apples. One of the things you can make is Apple Cider. Students got to put apples in the power juicer (with supervision) and help put in ingredients and stir our apple cider. When the cider was ready we used some of our senses to talk about what the cider smelled like, looked liked, and tasted like.
Then we talked about opinion writing and what it means to write an opinion. Students wrote if they liked apple cider or not. We also made sure to add important details into our drawings so that the readers knew were (such as drawing things we see in the classroom; carpet, whiteboard, desks, chairs, word wall), and what we were doing (drinking apple cider). They also practiced making a simple sentence with some of the sight words we’ve learned so far.
We continued our Polar Express unit and yesterday we read the story Night Tree and we talked about how both of the story were different and the same. The biggest thing we noticed were that in both stories, the characters had hot chocolate.
We then brainstormed describing words about hot chocolate using our senses. We took those words and wrote them on mugs and decorated those mugs with cotton ball “marshmallows”.
After our field trip on Friday we learned how other places participate in the fall harvest. Our class talked about how where I come from (in Michigan) we pick apples. We learned the letter Aa and read the book “Red Are the Apples” by Marc Harshman. We also retold the key details by remembering what were the different things on the farm and what colors they were.
Then we made a text to self connection by trying homemade apple cider (as they made apple cider at the end of the story). We learned about the five senses and used three of them to describe the apple cider in a writing activity.
This week we have started our new unit “Buggy about Spring!”. We started by reading the story Hopper Hunts for Spring and then we went on a nature walk to see if we could signs of spring. We saw snow melting, heard crows, felt rain falling, and smelled the fresh air. Because we live so close to the arctic circle, it takes longer for the snow to the melt. So our pictures of our spring looks more like winter in the lower 48. When we came back we wrote about our 5 senses in spring.
