This week was all about Tacky the Penguin. We'd first learned about Tacky during Christmastime. He is hilarious, and the books teach us wonderful lessons about acceptance and appreciating others' differences.
One day we read Tacky the Penguin. It was great to finally read Helen Lester's first tale about this hilarious bird. After we read the story, the students created bubble maps for Tacky.
We also read Three Cheers for Tacky and Tacky the Winter Games. We learned about character analysis and talked about how good readers look for character traits. We look at a character's outside and we also infer what they are like on the inside, looking at their action and dialogue. We talked about Tacky together in order to practice our character analysis.
Another book we read was Tacky in Trouble. This one is hilarious! It might be my favorite, but I think I say that about every Tacky book. :) Tacky finds himself lost on a tropical island with an elephant named Rocky. It's quite hilarious! After we read the story, we did a Story Map for the book.
I think Tackylocks and the Three Bears was one of the favorite books this week. After we read the story, the students completed their own Double Bubbles comparing Tackylocks to Goldilocks.
During writing time this week we worked on publishing a book inspired by Tacky. The students brainstormed who their penguin characters would be and what setting they'd be in. We also thought about problems the penguins might encounter and what solution they could possibly have.
For Social Studies we talked about Martin Luther King, Jr. this week. Since his birthday was on Tuesday we wanted to celebrate him all week long! We learned about him in the biography section of PebbleGo. Then we wrote sentences about things we had learned and drew a picture of him. These turned out very well! I love some of the speech bubbles that our friends added to their photos. Once again, it's fun to see each child's personality come through in their artwork.
We also made birthday cakes to celebrate MLK, Jr's birthday on Tuesday. The kids brainstormed what they would want to give him for his birthday after we read Happy Birthday, Martin Luther King. They came up with wonderful, bucket-filling gifts. Then we wrote what we would give him on the cakes.
Our class discussed how MLK, Jr. was a great citizen. We made connections to his story by discussing how we could be better citizens.
In math we've been working on comparing and ordering numbers to 100. Finding patterns on the hundreds chart seems to be going well, since we do it during Calendar every day. We talk about how numbers change by one in a row, and they change by ten in a column. We also made Pac-Man to help us remember "greater than" and "less than." Of course this is always a huge hit, and I think it really helps the kiddos understand some of the harder concepts! We talked about how Pac-Man is greedy and super-hungry so he always wants to eat the bigger numbers.
I hope everyone is having a nice holiday off. We'll be doing lots of more fun penguiny things this upcoming week!
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