Friday, April 29, 2011

Punctuation Study: Quotation Marks


1. What do you notice about this sentence?
2. Where are the quotation marks?
3. Now write your own sentence with dialogue. Be sure to use quotation marks.
(page taken from Ed Young's Seven Blind Mice)


Allie: Little Groundhog




Thursday, April 28, 2011

Big Fergus!

Writers make characters bigger when they're excited. Sometimes they use happy colors, like yellow, to make you know more of how the characters feel. (taken from Good Boy, Fergus! by David Shannon)

Little Pea: Colors of Peas

DH: "You can tell if they're grownups or little kids by their colors and by their size. And you can tell by their faces because usually the grownups aren't really smiling...but it actually depends." (page taken from Little Pea by Amy Krouse Rosenthal)

PN: Salt and Pepper vs. Ketchup and Mustard

PN says it's important to make your characters the right size "or  you won't know if that's Mustard or Ketchup because Salt and Pepper are smaller than those." Readers take writers seriously when their character sizes make sense.

AW: The Little Goose cover




KM: Big Dog cover

When you make your cover, KM says "Always do your best because you don't want your work to be sloppy."

KM: Bear vs. Fox

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

WH: Dragon Cover

DH: The Little Duckling








DH: Cover of The Little Duckling

Does DH hook you with her cover or what?!

WH: Cool Cover

WH thinks he has hooked his reader by putting details on his cover--like the feather on the knight's helmet.

EllaMae: Arranging Words on a Page

EllaMae chose to put pictures between her words because to make the story more interesting for the reader.

Monday, April 25, 2011

Jelly Bean fractions!


We forget which color we had the most of, but we KNOW for sure the color we had the least was pink because Mrs. Overman ate most of the pink!

Thursday, April 21, 2011

A Spring Day Outside for Earth Day and Easter

Dandelions! A great sign of Spring...and need for weed killer for some!

Hiking out to the woods behind our school on this lovely sunny day!

See the bright green buds?

Look at the green grass around our school!

Green plants growing up from the brown leaves make us excited for Spring too!

We think these plants look like umbrellas.

Pretty green leaves and a purple violet!

Hangin' out in the woods--literally.

Just sitting around...

The river behind our school has new green growing by it too.

Happy Earth Day! B. found some barbed wire to throw in the trash. "Lucky me!" he said.

Cool boys on and by a rock.

Boys hunting for the Easter eggs the girls hid.

The girls are keeping their backs turned while the boys hide eggs for them to find.

Each team had 84 eggs to find! Both teams (boys and girls) found all of them TWICE!

The easiest way to count them was to put them in groups of ten.

Boys hide their eyes while the girls hide the eggs.

Girls hunt the eggs hidden by the boys.

More egg hunting.

More hunting!