The Hundred Dresses

The Second Graders are well into The Hundred Dresses, a well-loved Co-op favorite about a girl who is worried about her part in the bullying of a classmate. The book was written in the early 1900s, but the ideas are still relevant. In the chapters we read today, the teacher has created a drawing competition – the girls will draw dresses and the boys will design motor boats. I asked the Second Graders to choose subjects to draw for our contest. One group chose a person with an animal, and a skyscraper. The other chose a Halloween costume and a dress. We will judge the drawings next week (Co-op-style!)

Harriet’s Halloween Candy

Halloween is Friday, so I took out an old favorite Halloween story. In Harriet’s Halloween Candy, Harriet is reluctant to share her bounty with her little brother, Walt. She organizes and sorts it, hides and eats it, and makes her self quite ill in the process. She finally decides to share when she can’t eat another morsel.

I gave each of the First Graders a bag of pattern blocks to use as their Halloween candy – to organize, sort, count, and, hopefully, not eat!

Niagra Falls, or Does It?

We continued reading the Hank Zipzer book today. In Chapter 4, Hank presents a top ten list of reasons that he should not have to write the five-paragraph essay about his summer vacation that he has been assigned. Before reading it to the Fourth Graders, I asked them to write their own entry, as if they were Hank appealing to Ms. Adolph. Here are some of their reasons:
I will probably not do good spelling so you will have to correct it.

The principal does not want me to do it so he will fire you.

You won’t be able to read it because I am relly bad at spelling and I don’t remeber what i did this summer.

If I must write this essay, I will become so scared and worried that I might not survive.

I should not do it because it would stress me out and it would not help me learn if I am stressed out.

I do not want to.

We had an interesting conversation about the difficulties people have getting their creative ideas from their brains to their papers…