'Tis the Season

This last week before our Christmas break, students have been busy writing labels, greetings, sentences, and paragraphs. Much of the work had to do with Christmas traditions and holiday greetings. Older students constructed a short paragraph about a family tradition, then illustrated it using TuxPaint. The  younger students, still learning about the painting program, drew a Christmas object, then used the Fill option to color it in. A quick label or short sentence finished the project.

Students also viewed an ebook, Olive the Other Reindeer, through Tumblebooks. Some also watched The Polar Express. 

TuxPaint, the program mentioned above, is a versatile, robust program which is free for most operating systems. To download it to your computer at home, click here. And don't forget to download the stamps!

2011 Ladybug Award Winner

And the winner is...

Memoirs of a Goldfish!

This book got 4,892 votes from kids in New Hampshire. Interrupting Chicken came in second with 4,880 votes. How many more votes did Goldfish get than Chicken?? Leave your answer in the comment section!

We Vote!

Today we vote for a book to win the Ladybug Award. We listened to the third graders talk about each book while we looked at the book's illustrations. Then we voted by circling the book that we liked the best. Voting is private so we didn't tell people which one we picked. We will know by winter vacation which book won the Ladybug Award.

Written by DES Kindergartners

Ladybug Book #7: Guyku

At school today, Mrs. Shedds's class was the first to hear this Ladybug Award nominee, Guyku by Bob Raczka and Peter Reynolds. Guyku is a collection of seasonal haiku poems written to appeal to boys but we know girls liked them too! We learned that haikus are short, structured poems with a pattern: line 1 has 5 syllables, line 2 has 7 syllables, and line 3 has five syllables. We counted syllables as we read some of the funny haikus in the book!

Then we tried writing our own Thanksgiving haiku. The last line is clever and funny! What do you think of it?

Turkeys in the woods

Hide in pine trees from hunters

They gobble pine cones

Ladybug Book #6: Interrupting Chicken

Interrupting Chicken by David Ezra Stein is a really good book. The little red chicken interrupts three fairy tales that his Papa tells him at bedtime. He interrupted when the witch came. He interrupted when the wolf came. He jumps right into the story! We think this book is funny and silly. We really like this book a lot!!

by DES Kindergartners

Local "Star"!

Mrs. Brown told me this morning that the new picture book, Stars, by Danbury author Mary Lyn Ray is on the New York Times Best Seller list for November 13th! Look!!

Thank you to Ms. Ray for providing each DES classroom with a reading poster with a beautiful illustration from her book, and for giving each DES student a "Hide Out With a Book" bookmark! We love having these reminders of her generosity to our school and of her beautiful and inspiring new story. We at DES wish her continued success with this wonderful new book!

Ladybug Book #5: One

At first glance, this book looks like it's about colors and perhaps even numbers, But all the DES children who heard it know that it's about bullying. This is a very creative and interesting way to reinforce this powerful message.  Here's a video of the author, Kathryn Otoshi, reading her Ladybug nominated book, One, while some elementary school children act it out for an audience. Check it out.