Proper Piggies in Puddles

Today, these little piggies learned a lot! 

We reviewed some of the things we discussed last week, including the pig terms "farrow" and "gilt".  We also talked more about homophones (such as the for homophones for our vocab terms, "Pharaoh and "guilt").  We talked about recent farm happenings, including Daisy breaking into our laundry room, finding the 50lb bag of rabbit feed, and chewing a HOLE in the side!  What a MESS!

We went over common and proper nouns today, as well.  The class took little piggies, each with a different noun listed on it, and decided whether or not the pig needed to wallow in the "proper noun mud puddle" or the "common noun pond".  For the younger kids, we really discussed proper and common nouns, going through many examples.  For the older kids, we went deeper.  We talked about how names such as "Holly" can be proper when used as a name, but are common when used to talk about a plant.  There were many farm examples of this, including Daisy, Honey, Muffin, and Copper.  We also talked about how words like "Grandpa" can be proper when used as the name of the grandparent, but common when simply talking about the person in a general sense, such as "My grandpa came to dinner."  These can get tricky!

Our story today was "The True Story of the Three Little Pigs".  In this story, the wolf tells the tale from his point of view.  Needless to say, he puts a different spin on things!  I used this story to teach about comparing and contrasting.  The kids learned about Venn Diagrams, using one to help organize the class's ideas about things that happened in the two stories.

The class also discussed facts and opinions, in respect to the story that we read.  After the book, I read different sentences to the class.  The kids figured out whether or not the sentences were fact or opinion.  It seems like an easy concept, but these can actually get tricky... especially when it is a "fact" statement, but is not true.  For instance, the sentence "The first pig built his home of sticks," is a fact statement, as it can be proven to be false.

After our art time, we concluded the day... which wraps up our first workshop of the year!