Day 58- Beacuse we couldn't make pizza...

We made butter! There's nothing better than freshly churned butter. (I'm sure. I've never had any, so I'm guessing.) Well, we don't have a butter churn at school, so we had to be creative.

We revisited the Little Red Hen today. We reread the story from yesterday,

 then we read The Little Red Hen Makes a Pizza, which picks up where the first one leaves off. The Hen is done eating her bread, takes a nap, and wakes up hungry again. She spies a jar of tomato sauce and decides to make a pizza.

Now, one would assume that since they didn't get to eat the bread, that the other animals would be more willing to help with the pizza. Not so. They were still just as lazy. Now I don't want to give out any spoilers, but the book does end on a high note!

After finishing both stories, we made a Venn Diagram comparing and contrasting the two tales.

Now, we did this activity at the end of they day, so I'm jumping the gun here, but my students loved what we did next. I had told them that there was a surprise at the end of the day if they behaved, (and they did) so I went around the room asking each student if he or she would help me churn some butter. Of course, everyone said, "Yes!" We gathered at the carpet.

Now I bet you didn't know that butter can be made in a classroom by shaking whipping cream in an enclosed container for around 5 minutes. Well, I didn't know that until last year when I had my class make butter when we studied solids, liquids and gasses in science. Gotta love science experiments!

So I had my husband go out last night to get some whipping cream for today and I packed up some small containers. My students sat in a circle on the carpet (some were out of the room for this part) and I poured out cream into the different containers. Mrs. Hughes was our camera woman!

I explained that the cream would turn int butter ONLY if it was shaken at a fast pace for around 5 minutes. Doesn't sound like a long time, but our arms were tired! We had 4 mini tubs going around the circle at one time.

 Shake it, Soldiers!!

The finished product. Yummy!

I had made some bread last night just for the occasion. It just wouldn't be right to eat butter with no bread. :)

 It was a big hit! We made sure to share it with Mrs. Hughes too. :)

In math (which we have in the beginning of the day) our lesson was on turning addition facts into subtraction facts. Students had to take an addition fact like 4+4=8 and turn it into subtraction 8-4=4. We learned in a PREVIOUS POST  that when you subtract, the bigger number has to go first because you can't take a big number out of a small number. (We're in first grade, we aren't going to be dealing with negative numbers)

While we were doing a sample problem, one of my soldiers explained her reasoning so well, I had to get it on video. (I think it intimidated her a little, but you can still tell that she knows what she's talking about!)

Most impressive, Soldier!

From what I could tell, most of my students understood the addition to subtraction concept. I'll be able to tell more tomorrow when we have more practice.

I'm saving our science lesson until tomorrow when we'll have more to share. Here's a hint- it involves 2 new science songs! Yea!

Literacy center pictures: (not a lot today)

Our Daily Brain