Mushroom in the Rain

For our ELA curriculum we use Open Court Reading. I might have mentioned before how difficult this monster book is to understand. When I got the book the first week of school I started looking through it and it may as well have been in another language because there were so many facets to it and it was jumping all over the place. It took me about a month to figure it out (and I'm still not confident that I understand how to use it to it's full potential!). This week marks the beginning of our second unit- and that means the second book in the teacher's edition. Each unit takes up a whole copy of the teacher's manual! Our new unit is on "Kindness" and all the stories are related to being kind. The story this week is called Mushroom in the Rain and is about a little ant that gets stuck out in the rain and hides under a mushroom.

The theme of the story is that more and more insects/animals see the ant under the mushroom and want to join to get out from the rain. Miraculously there is always room for each addition. Then the rain stops and when they come out from under the mushroom, the ant notices that the once tiny mushroom is now huge- and that mushrooms grow very fast in the rain. Of course the ant and other animals were being kind to each other by letting more under to get out of the rain. I had students read the story to a partner today (this was their first time reading it). I was working with two students that needed some extra help with vowel sounds. I got up to check everyone's progress to make sure I was able to bring them back to their seats (they should have been finished reading the story) so that we could move on in our very tight morning schedule when I was asked by one of my friends if he could keep reading because he loved this story. Now this is a child that I don't typically expect something like this from- so of course I allowed him to continue reading the story a second time. He said that he didn't think that a mushroom could grow that fast and that he was going to read the story again to make sure he wasn't missing something. I just thought this was sweet. 

Monday evening had another paper due about my Teachers Work Sample (the huge project I have to complete during student teaching) I am doing a unit in science about the life cycle of a plant. I'm going to have the kids plant seedlings on Tuesday of next week and then we will watch them grow over the next three weeks. The students have no idea that we are doing this- I will be giving them clues all week about it to get them excited.