Our Busy Week

It’s only Wednesday and the kids have already gotten so many things learned and accomplished! They have become such great workers—it’s so neat to see the growth that has taken place in them! This week we have been reviewing all our letters and sounds.  We have also been focusing on all things WINTER! We read The Mitten by Jan Brett on Monday and talked about the sequence of events that happened in the story. They were able to tell me which animals came into the mitten first, second, third…etc. They will be bringing home mittens they made with their own animals so they can retell the story to you using their “props.”

                

Tuesday we talked about things we see in the winter.  I had a big chart where we recorded all our answers.  The students told me something they saw in the winter and then they all helped me spell the word by sounding out the letters. AWESOME! They loved being able to tell ME how to do something! They came up with lots of great answers and we finished with this sentence activity:

The students completed a worksheet with these sentences and filled in the words “the” and “see.” Ask them to read their sentences to you this weekend!

Today we read The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats. Peter, the main character, does many fun things in the snow. We made text to self connections by thinking of things we do in the snow that Peter did too! They did a great job of making connections from the book to their own lives!

  

Peter made a snow angel. I made a snow angel.

LAST THING! In Math we are working hard on counting and recognizing the “teen” numbers.  They are very good at counting them, now we just need to be able to write them! This counting hat page was a good start! We are also working on counting to 100 by 10’s.

Letter "P" Practice

I am starting to make lessons for each letter to practice writing it as well as websites to review the sound.  There is also a fun video clip for the students to watch, too! Here is the first, of hopefully 26, letters!

Feel free to let your student do this at home. I will also be introducing it for them to do at school.

http://mrichardson23.wikispaces.com/Letter+P

Winter Wonderland…(Kind Of!)

Our first four days back at school flew by! We were very busy learning about our letter friend, Mr. D and his dazzling dances! We also did a lot of fun things with snowmen and winter. However, it’s been difficult to think that it is winter when there is no snow on the ground and the kids are outside playing in 60 degree weather!
Before we left for Christmas break, the kids made their own snowman and decorated it however they wanted.

This week we read the book All You Need for a Snowman by Alice Shertle. We talked about the steps in making a snowman using the words first, next and last.  The kids drew three pictures showing the progression of making a snowman. Then, they wrote the steps. They are starting to stretch out words by sounding out each letter and doing SUCH A GOOD JOB! They impress me everyday with their abilities! This project turned out great!
            

                                                    First, roll a ball. Next, roll one more snowball. Last, add detail.

 
Another fun writing prompt we did was, “If I lived in a Snowglobe I would….” We pictured in our minds what we would be doing inside the snowglobe and then brainstormed together some of our ideas. The kids were then able to draw the picture and write about it.

                  
 I would invite a friend over.                                             I would ice-skate.
This next project was hard to visualize, since we don’t have any snow on the ground!! But the kids used their imagination and made connections from past experiences to accomplish our goal. I asked the kids to close their eyes and imagine what it would look like outside in the winter if they were looking from their window.  They came up with lots of fun ideas like making snowmen, sledding, having a snowball fight, other houses with Christmas lights and snow plows
The kids loved the fact that their pictures look like a window! I do too!
Here’s our classroom display

  
               

On Friday I read the book Snowmen at Night. Instead of using the normal book, I projected it onto the screen thanks to:
http://www.wegivebooks.org/books/snowmen-at-night
I read the words as the kids looked at the big pictures.  It is a really neat book! We did a writers workshop on it afterwards where they got to choose what their snowman was doing during the night. Boxing, milking a cow, and riding a monster truck were some of my favorites.
This next week is all about REVIEW! We will be reviewing ALL of the letters we have learned so far and doing various assessments to make sure we really know our letters and sounds and how they are written (uppercase and lowercase).  If you get a chance, please review all of these letters with your child so they get all the practice they can!
                     
Thank you!

All Aboard!

We had such a fun day pretending to be on the Polar Express. The kids came dressed in their pajamas and we started the day getting our tickets punched to board the train! We watched the story online and the kids loved feeling like they were actually on the train. 

We enjoyed fun activities like making our own train and drinking hot chocolate.

 

 

 

Hanukkah and Las Posadas

We have been learning about the different Christmas traditions celebrated among people. We learned that Hanukkah means the festival of light and people that celebrate Hanukkah light a Menorah with a candle called the Shamash. We made a Menorah out of our hand prints and also made our own dreidels. The kids learned how to play with a dreidel and enjoyed playing with their tables.

  

The next celebration we learned about was Las Posadas. It is a nine day celebration full of parties, piñatas and food! We looked at pictures of what the people wear when they celebrate Las Posadas. They wear serapes and we were able to make our own serapes and go to different kindergarten rooms asking if they had room for us to enjoy a party! We ended up in our own room enjoying cookies and watching a story online called Too Many Tamales.

Here we are in our serapes!

Gingerbread Man Story

Check out our Gingerbread Man Story!



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLtja3sWytc&feature=share

Gingerbread Man

This past week we learned all about the Gingerbread Man! We read many different versions of The Gingerbread Man and compared what was the same and what was different. The students also got to create their own ending to the story in a creative writing/drawing.  I will upload a video of this soon!

The first activity we did focused on our five senses.  The kids helped me fill in this gingerbreads fives senses and then they got to make their own!

Hear: Jingle Bells

See: Googly Eyes

Smell: Cotton ball with perfume on it

Taste: Peppermint

Touch: Tissue Paper

We read the book Gingerbread Friends by Jan Brett. In this version of The Gingerbread Man, the gingerbread man doesn’t get eaten but instead finds a gingerbread house with more gingerbread people! To illustrate this, we made our own gingerbread houses. We outlined the house with white crayon and then used construction paper to make the candy. They are all so unique!

Here they are hard at work!

 

                

We also did a gingerbread glyph. The students decorated their gingerbread man according to the glyph we followed. Then they got to paint and “sew” him up!

                            

To finish our gingerbread man unit up, we measured how tall we were compared to the gingerbread man using peppermints. I have pictures but they are on my other computer—so hopefully I can post those soon! The kids loved seeing how many peppermints tall they were and it was a fun way to talk about the words shorter and taller. They had to do this worksheet and draw how many peppermints tall the gingerbread man was and how many peppermints tall they were. This is how it turned out:

And of course, we had to top it all off with a gingerbread man cookie.