This week we completed our first author study by reading books only by Donald Crews.  We learned what an author and illustrator do and found out that sometimes the same person does both jobs, and sometimes two or more people work together.  During our week we read 5 books—Truck, Sail Away, Freight Train, Harbor, and Flying.  Each is a book about Transportation.  Our job as readers was to listen to the story and be able to use one sentence to tell what the story was about.  Our other job was to listen for Onomatopoeias, or sound words.  In our story, and transportation songs, we found words like putt and vroom.  On Thursday we realized that animal sounds are also onomatopoeias and made a great list of words that include tweet, buzz, and moo.

By the end of the week we created a wonderful sound word poster as well as a book summary poster that gives a 1-2 sentence summary of each book.  We also chose our favorite book of the week; it was pretty close, but the Freight Train book was the book with the most votes—6 students favored it over the other four books.

In STEMM we continued our investigations into ramps with non-wheeled items to see if they would slide or roll down a variety of ramps.  We had a great time in yoga on Wednesday with Mike the Space Monkey and his adventure.  We also made origami sail boats and used unifix cubes to make groups of ten during math.

We also celebrated our September birthdays–Happy Birthday to Owen, Maurice, Matthew, Rui, Ms. Carol, and me :-)