Arts Extravaganza Week

This week Chets Creek is celebrating the Arts! Our hallways have been transformed into an art gallery with our students' visual art from throughout the year, and each morning we are treated to an assembly featuring different types of performing arts.

On Monday, the Sugar and Spice Puppetry group performed for us. We danced and laughed as were entertained by the puppets and magician. Perhaps we will have some little magicians and puppeteers in our room.

Tuesday brought us members of the percussion section of the Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra! We learned all about percussion instruments and rhythm. Check out these videos from their performance:

Persuasive Writing

We are beginning a new unit in writing this week! We will begin learning about Persuasive Writing. Our unit is based on writing persuasive letters to friends and family, so our first step is teaching our students how to writing letters. Today we began by choosing our favorite book by Eric Carle and telling why it is our favorite in the body of our letter. Tomorrow we will learn about adding things to our letter such as the date, greeting, salutation, and signature.

As our unit progresses, we will begin using our letters to convince people of our idea. For example, we may be writing a letter to our parents asking for a new toy and explaining why we think that we deserve the toy. We will be stressing making our request and including detailed support in order to convince our reader.

The book I Wanna Iguana by Karen Kaufman Orloff is great for show young learners what we mean by persuasive writing. The book is about a boy who writes letters back and forth to his mother trying to convince her to let him have an iguana. We hope that this is the direction that our students' writing will be headed during this unit! So, get ready, I hear the postman heading in your direction!