Moon Pies and Cee Lo Green

What a week, and it's only Wednesday! The week before vacation is always tough. Everybody, including me, has the vacation itch!

Here is a peek at what we did today.

Elapsed time....ugh!! This is such a hard concept for some kids. We kept plugging away with our foam clocks and white boards. Practice makes perfect.

We read this silly story. 

Here's the summary:

Jimmy Zangwow is bound and determined to get his hands on his favorite snack: Moon Pies and milk. After his mother refuses his pre-dinner request, Jimmy stomps off to sulk aboard his secret project, a flying junk jumbilee jalopy. "Holy macaroni!" The next thing he knows he's hurtling off to space, toward the moon... and "Mmm! Moon Pies." A hilariously digressive dialogue with sleepy, hard-of-hearing Mr. Moon results in Jimmy scoring a thousand Moon Pies. But our hungry hero's troubles are not over yet. Run-ins with Mars Men and the dreaded Grimble Grinder are yet in store. And then there's the issue of how to get back to Earth and his brussels-sprout-noodle-bean casserole dinner.

The kids loved it. After reading, the kids' imaginations ran wild as they wrote stories about their own adventures to the moon. Since we are covering the moon in Science right now, I had the kids include some content area vocabulary words in their writing. 

Here is the highlight of my day! Caution: This will get stuck in your head, don't say I didn't warn you! 

I came across this little gem on the internet today, and immediately wrote it into my science plans!

I can't take credit for creating it, but I definitely had a blast using it in my classroom. I shared the find with my fellow 4th grade teachers, and you could hear this echoing throughout our hallway all afternoon! 

As easy as Pie!

Who says you can't use food in the classroom anymore? Up in room 310, we've been all about the PIE. Author's purpose pie, that is.  We've been learning that authors write for three main purposes: to persuade, to inform, or to entertain. Take the first letter of each, and you get PIE!

We read three different books about pigs. The kids had to decide what the author's purpose was for each one. They realized that even though the books were all about the same topic, pigs, they each had a very different purpose. 

We charted their responses. 

Then they became the authors. I gave each child a book about an animal. The animal became their topic. They had to write three different selections about their animal. One had to persuade, one had to inform and one had to entertain.They got creative for persuasive writing. Many kids wrote a commercial. Some wrote from the animals point of view. For example, a turtle tried to convince the reader not to litter, while a lion tried to convince humans that he was a gentle, kind animal. 

This turned out to be quite the cross curriculum assignment. It involved reading, writing, researching, science and art. Don't ya just love when it all comes together like that?! 

I don't know about you, but all this talk about pie made me hungry!