The Sky

Today when we read aloud The Starry River of the Sky we heard the story about the Celestial Rooster.  The story told us how WangYi's wife figured out how to bring the sun out of the mountain.  The sun was hiding scared that the humans would shoot it down.  WangYi's wife suggested that they try to have animals call to the sun. They unsuccessfully try to use the cricket, then the tiger, then the cow, but then WangYi's wife suggests the rooster.  The rooster calls out and the sun comes out of the sky.

I liked this story and I loved the word celestial.  We went back to our seats and had a dictionary race (the groups race to see who can find the word the quickest).  When we found the word celestial, the class found it meant relating to the sky.  This was perfect because we were going to start reading about what Native Americans believed about the stars.

To do this we started to read the book The Earth Under Sky Bear's Feet.

I love this book.  It is filled with Native American poems of the land.  The poem that we read today was from the Mohawk tribe.  Before we read the poem we located where the Mohawk tribe was located in the United States on the map.  Once we finally got to the poem we worked on trying to find similarities between the Mohawk poem of Sky Bear to the story we read yesterday.

As we learn about these Native Americans stories we are also learning about the first Native Americans in Ohio.  The class started to read a magazine/newspaper about the Paleo-Indians.  You can find this magazine in the Social Studies folder.  While the students were reading one section of the magazine, we had them create a list of important words.  Here is some of the list we created as a class:

• migration
• hunters
• stone
• flint
• mastodons
• mammoths
• Ohio
• chief

The list is going to help us tomorrow as we use a strategy called Keep It or Junk It.  In Keep It or Junk It they are going to try and cut their list of about 17 words down to around 5 important words.  Then they will use these important words to help them answer a question about the Paleo-Indians.

I loved how the whole day seemed to be connected!

Hope you are all having a great week.