Sunday, May 23, 2010

Writer's Celebration


We had a Writer's Celebration in our classroom this month to show off our great writing skills! We worked so hard on a piece of writing and were able to share it with our friends and family. We began our piece of writing using a simple graphic organizer to plan elements of our story we were going to write including the setting, characters, problem and solution. We worked on our drafts and then learned how to revise and edit them. The students met with their "editor" (ME!), and worked REALLY hard in the computer lab to type their story. After their books were typed, printed, and bound, the students illustrated their pieces using markers. After three weeks of hard work, we had our celebration complete with cookie and lemonade.

Butterflies

At the end of April-beginning of May, we studied butterflies in our classroom. How fitting for our class, Mrs. Bonner's Brilliant Butterflies! Our school has an AWESOME butterfly garden where we searched high and low for eggs, chrysalises, and caterpillars. We were unsuccessful in finding any this year (I am sure due to the COLD weather this Winter), but had a great time doing it! It was amazing to see that the students knew what to look for from all of the facts we had been learning!













We did find some evidence of munching.......



















It is a good thing that I ordered Painted Lady butterflies in the mail from InsectLore http://www.insectlore.com/. They came in a container filled with food. They are very easy to deal with! You leave the five caterpillars in the container as they eat and build their chrysalises. Once this has occurred, you simply pin the paper insert with the chrysalises attached into your butterfly habitat and wait.... Very EASY! Our butterflies came out in 8 days. We took a vote and named them different silly names, but Brilliant was one of them!