The Hungry Students...

We spent the week reading a fun big book called The Hungry Giant.  In this story, a giant demands certain food from the townspeople:  bread, butter and honey.  They try to find everything he wants, but when he asks for the honey, none can be found.  The townspeople trick the giant and send him running for home.  Ask your child to retell the story to you.

To celebrate our reading, the students found some items in the Surprise Bag.  We found honey...

and bread - but no butter.

We did find some whipping cream...

plastic knives...

some salt, and a mason jar with a marble in it.

The students did some problem solving and decided since we didn't find any butter, we should try to make it use the cream and the mason jar.  We filled the mason jar with whipping cream and a pinch of salt.  We left the marble in to help mix everything up.

Then it was time to SHAKE...

and shake....

and shake!!

We all took turns shaking the jar over and over and over again.

As the jar made its way around the circle, we noticed the cream was getting thicker and the marble was moving less.  We decided to take a look inside, and we found...

BUTTER!

Now it was time to have a snack just like the Hungry Giant!

Exploring the Rain Forest

Over the past couple weeks, the students have been very interested in exploring books and information about the rain forest.  Our shared reading story hooked the students interest, and we've learned so much along the way.

One of the big books we have been exploring is Step Inside the Rain Forest by Meish Goldish. After we had read the story several times together, we started looking closely at the illustrations by Susan T. Hall.  The students were very interested in all the different animals found in the rain forest.  

Take a look at what happened when I left the big book, some pencils and sticky notes on the back table...

It was amazing to sit back and watch the collaboration, cooperation and teamwork that was displayed.  The students worked together identifying and labeling not only the animals from the story, but also the plants and trees.  In the above picture, you can see that one of the students labelled the "canopy" of the rain forest as well.

The students worked long and hard on this activity - at some points, there were 11 students working on the book together at the same time.  Take a look at all the things they found and labeled...

The next day, the students returned to the big book and realized there were some animals in the book that they couldn't identify.  In true problem solving form, they decided to look in the other books we had collected from the library to see if they could find the names of the animals...and they did!!

It was truly magical to see all the students working together in this student-driven, authentic, meaningful activity!