The Day of the Book

Our April PLUSS day was such a wonderful day!  We enjoyed "The Day of the Book" a vision of our Middle School Librarian, Mrs. Montrie.  As some of you in our community know, Mrs. Montrie is courageously fighting cancer and hasn't been in school for many months.  Mr. Scott and Mrs. Rutstein along with others were determined to make her vision a reality and that's just what they did!

On Monday, first graders made their selections for The Day of the Book from over 80 options.  All students in 1A were encouraged to select one session with our visiting Caldecott winning illustrator, Pamela Zagarenski.  This left two sessions for them to choose what they'd like to learn about.  Lower school and Middle School students and faculty members lead sessions ranging from book creation, cartooning, making bookworms, and playing games with a book theme.

Many of our 1A students blogged about their day on their personal blogs which you can access here:

http://kidblog.org/MissMunteansFriendsinFirst/

Take a peek at who has commented on the posts where her session was highlighted!  SO COOL!!

Our day wrapped up with an all LS and MS school DEAR  (Drop Everything And Read) time on the field and a LS Smackdown- a period of reflection.  

Hopefully your child came home with many positive things to say about this day as I think it was a day they really enjoyed and will remember for years to come.  

Because we were all spread out, I wasn't able to get too many photos, but managed to get a few here and there:

Illustrating with Pamela Zagarenski!

First graders, what was the highlight of your day?  Post a comment with all of us to share. 

Mexican Jumping Beans!

In connection with our unit on Mexico, we used our March PLUSS day to jump for joy for the Mexican Jumping Bean!

Our morning kicked off with Mr. Scott and Senora Neyra reading Lucas and his Loco Beans by Ramona Moreno.

Next, we headed upstairs to the science room to receive our beans, observe them, and learn about their life cycle with Mrs. Filer.  

 We opened a few beans so we could see what the larvae inside look like:

 After lunch we headed up to the art room to work with Mrs. Weiss to make houses for our beans:

We concluded our day with a Mexican Hat Dance lead by Dr. Culbertson:

It was another terrific PLUSS day in first grade!  Thank you to all of our community members who made it possible- Mr. Scott, Mrs. Filer, Senora Neyra, Senora Pena-Welch, Mrs. Weiss, and Dr. Culbertson

I overheard a first grader as he was leaving with his mom today.  He said, "Mama, guess what!? We are going to have six moths in our house!"  Hopefully this won't be the case, but as your first grader should be able to explain to you, with the use of their life cycle drawings, this very well could happen! If you keep your beans in the refrigerator (the area of the fridge where you store butter is the recommended area), the beans will last longer in this state.

First graders, this was such a fun day with you!  What was your favorite part of today?  Post a comment to share with all of us!  

I posted our slideshow of photos from Dr. Seuss Day on Friday. Click here