Talking Fish, Egg Hunt, and Adjective Rainbows

Quarks Writers Workshop
We continued our talk on adjectives this week first by reading “Lilly’s Purple Plastic Purse” stopping in descriptive paragraphs to find the key words. We did our own share-and-tell session describing our brought items with 3 or more adjectives. The group then made their own rainbows and and came up with words that described spring (stinky, muddy, cold were some examples) that we helped them write onto the stripes. The class wrapped up by guessing the objects I had hidden in brown bags and described by adjectives.
Neutron math games:
Today the neutrons went on an egg hunt. Each egg had a different number of jelly beans in it. Then each neutron made an estimate as to how many beans were in his/her egg and lined up according to estimates. We then opened the eggs to see how they did. It seemed that the fewer beans in the egg the easier to accurately estimate how many.
Then we had a jelly bean taste test and voted according to our favorite flavor. We made a bar graph and a pie chart to represent our preferences. The results are:
Favorite flavor: green apple with 4 votes!
Blue raspberry came next with 3
Watermelon had 2 votes
And orange, grape, and strawberry each got one vote.
Muons and Electrons Writer’s Workshop Point of View: An unexpected point of view
Continuing our study of point of view, we read an excerpt from The Voyages of Dr. Dolittle, by Hugh Lofting. In this excerpt called, “Thirteen Months in an Aquarium”, a fish tells his first person account of life in an aquarium. After reading the excerpt, we had a discussion about the author’s choice of point of view and what it made us think about. Next, we talked about the literary device, personification, how it was used in this excerpt as well as other examples we’ve seen or could think of. For the writing prompt, the Muons and Electrons had the opportunity to choose an unlikely object for his/her character, and personify it by writing a first person narrative from his/hers/its point of view. After the writing session, the children volunteered to share the narrative. Some interesting ideas that came forth were: spoon, lizard, baseball bat, hair band, and purple diamond.