A Big Bite

Creative Arts Friday was a blast !  After spending much time on division, heredity and all of our other work in reader's and writer's workshop this past week, it was wonderful to spend a day celebrating the book The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate.  We started our day with 5 math problems about Ivan and the other characters in the book.  Then we did a light yoga set featuring animals  and objects that can be found in the zoo, rain forest or jungle.  We stood like trees, breathed like lions, swung our trunks like elephants, hissed like snakes and jumped like frogs.  We relaxed for a few minutes like sloths before starting art centers.  We used crayons, markers, pencils and finger paints to create a four picture model on a black frame. Thanks to Mrs. Hess for letting us use her finger paints and special finger paint paper. :) We made a chart with tally marks of our snacks.  Some of the snacks that people had were bananas, raisins, marshmallow, popcorn and other fruits.  We watched the Disney movie Tarzan and made comparisons to real gorillas and human and gorilla interactions.  So many students had never seen it before!  With Mrs. Merten's class, we thanked Mrs. Toye for making it possible for us to read Ivan.  She supported the teachers when they said that they wanted to teach specific reading skills, like similes and character traits with this book, so she asked Mrs. Richards to purchase them for us.Thanks, Mrs. Toye! We worked on writing poems in a variety of styles using the characters from the book.We played Pictionary with vocabulary words that we have been studying. The pictures were great.  We looked at some of the Power Point Presentations that we created with Mrs. Merten in technology and will view the rest next week. 

Our student council election was very interesting.  Due to a tie vote, we needed to recast ballots to determine a winner.  The results will be announced on Tuesday after everyone has an opportunity to vote. Overall,  it was an awesome day!