Playing 'School' at School

Future Kindergarten Teachers?



During our pretend play time, I caught a few of my students playing 'school'... something I used to do all the time when I was little. I thought it was cute and wanted to share it with you! :)

Polar Express Day

Today was Polar Express day which also means: PAJAMA DAY! The kids looked adorable in their flannel pants and footie pajama's.
After we read The Polar Express by Chris VanAllsburg we sequenced the story.  One of the things that happens in the story, is the boy drinks hot chocolate on the train.  We talked about hot chocolate ('ch') words and came up with a few to write on marshmallows.

We then made a giant mug for our hot chocolate words.

Love their little faces. 

Being silly.

Math: roll two dice, add the parts together to find the total. Then, color the Polar Express ticket that equals the sum.

We worked on our sentence building ... 

and had a little snack.



After lunch, I blew my conductor train whistle and handed the kids a ticket to board the train.

Once everyone had their ticket, we watched the movie, The Polar Express.  The students looked so cozy in their pajamas I had to take a picture!

Run, run, as fast as you can. You can't catch me...

...I'm the Gingerbread Man!

We began this week with gingerbread man day. Thank you to all of the parents who donated frosting, sprinkles and cookies to our classroom. The students enjoyed decorating their cookies and eating them!

Labeling the gingerbread man together.

Labeling the gingerbread man independently.

Decorating their gingerbread cookies.

Noah loved his!

"We should do this every day" - we really should. It was super fun!

Comparing and contrasting the Gingerbread Man story and the Gingerbread Girl story.

Santa's Owl Elf

Santa wrote us a letter back! Along with his letter, he sent this special classroom owl elf with it. The owl elf watches over our classroom every day and flies back to the North Pole to tell Santa how everyone is doing at night.  The students know that they can't touch the owl elf because if they do, he will not be able to fly anymore. The students were so excited, we decided to name our owl elf.  After brainstorming ideas and voting, the kids decided to name him 'Pups'. 

Each morning the owl elf places this note on a few students' tables.  Keep up the great work friends. I have a feeling everyone will get a note before Chrsitmas!

Questions for Santa

We learned how to spell Santa's name through this song and short video.  The students love it and I must say, it worked - they know how to spell Santa's name now. Click on the link if you want to give it a listen.  Just to warn you, it will more than likely be stuck in your head the rest of the day!

S-A-N-T-A song

We continued our role as scientists this week during our writing workshop time.  We watched Santa feed his reindeer at 11AM on the reindeer camera. If you want to check it out click on the link below:

Reindeer Camera

After we watched Santa feed the reindeer we started to talk about some of the things we saw.  We all love Santa but we realized that we have a lot of questions for him so we started to discuss them together.  After everyone had a chance to share their questions, we began to write them down.  

 The students created their own book for Santa, filled with questions they have for him.

This is one of my student's books. She did an awesome job.

"Why does Santa wear red and white every day?"

"Who is Santa's boss?"

"Why does Santa have reindeer?"

Don't you just love their creativity and curiosity? I sure do!

I told the class that I would send our question books to Santa this weekend.  We are hoping to hear back from him this week... I will keep you posted on what happens! :)

5th Grade Buddies Visit!

Our 5th grade buddies came to visit us on Friday and they brought their creativity and leadership skills with them.

They helped us create Christmas ornaments and Christmas cards.

Two sisters working together.

It has been fun to see their relationships together grow.

Thanks again 5th graders for your patience with us. We loved having you come into our classroom. We will have to do it again soon!

Let It Snow!

I would have to say that we definitely started getting into the winter spirit in the owl room this week.

We read this story by Barbara Joose and discussed what a snow day is and what the weather on a snow day looks like.  We learned about blizzards, sleet and ice.

After our discussion, we started to think about how much fun it would be to have a snow day. I shared with the class that I remember going sledding with my younger brother on snow days when I was little. We talked about how playing in the snow makes us feel cold and how drinking hot chocolate by the fire place is a great way to warm up. I remember doing this all the time when I was little so we brainstormed what we would do if we had a snow day this year at New Groningen. They had some great ideas. We wrote about them and made a snow man to hang in the hallway. If you're near our classroom you will have to check them out.

We've been working on listening to the ending sounds in words.  We even practiced our rhyming using the Smart Board.

 

My mom made holiday Play-Doh for our classroom.  The kids love the bright green and white sparkles. Thanks Mom! :)

The students were given green strips of paper and they had to arrange them from longest to shortest and create a Christmas tree. They turned out awesome!

Words, words, everywhere!

This week we began learning how to read and write color words.

I was excited to find this book at our school's book fair last week. I can't think of a better way for my classroom to learn about color words - they LOVE Pete the Cat!

Throughout the story, Pete steps on some different things that change the color of his shoes. The students recalled something from the story that Pete stepped in and sound spelled it.

Nishia wrote that Pete the Cat stepped into strawberries which turned his shoes red.

The students even made their own books all about colors. They came up with their own title, words and illustrations. It has been fun to watch them write their books.

We have been working on our popcorn words, too!

Writing popcorn words in Play-Doh is slightly more fun than pencil and paper. 

Write them with an etcha-sketch? Even better! 

When we don't know how to spell a word, we can stretch it out like a slinky, saying the sounds we hear slowly.  Elliot took a turn stretching a word out.  The kids have been working so hard and this visual seems to help. Keep it up friends!

Want or Need?

We welcomed December this week by talking about Christmas and discussing the difference between wants and needs. We learned that we need food, water, air, clothing and shelter to live and to stay healthy.

Using the Smart Board to label various objects as wants and needs.

With Christmas just around the corner, the students looked through magazines and newspaper flyers searching for things they want and need.  After they found a few items, they glued them onto a Christmas stocking.  Most of us, including me, found more items that we want than the things we need so we discussed this together.

When everyone finished, we hung our stockings around the room to remind us of what we learned. 

Aren't they cute? :)

Reading and Writing Stories

What a great week! It was wonderful to see my Owl friends again. I missed every one over our Thanksgiving break. I hope you enjoyed your holiday. I know I did!

We were able to make big strides this week during our reading and writing workshop time. 

The students and I have been reading books at our reading levels. Each day, we practice our 1:1 correspondence, stretching words we do not know and looking for picture clues to help us understand. 

The students and I even had a chance to practice reading quietly to ourselves around the room. I snapped a few pictures of the kids during this time to show you what a great job they are doing.

We also learned how to be authors and illustrators this week during our writing workshop time.  We practiced writing like scientists (ie: looking at, sorting, and describing objects). This week the students and I wrote a story about leaves. You can see this better by clicking on the video below. 

I'll post more about what we have been up to later. For now, I am off to bed. Good night!

Happy Thanksgiving!

What a week! Since we do not have school next week due to P/T conferences, the students and I ended our week with a few Thanksgiving activities.  Take a peek and what we've been up to... 

We wrote a turkey poem using site words and our hand prints.  

I love how little their hands are! 

We made turkeys that help us count to 100 by tens.   

We took some time to think of things that we are thankful for. Our list ranged from dolls to brothers. It was so much fun to hear the kids share the things that are special and important to them. After we wrote about these things we took some time to share them together.

She is thankful for her mom, dad, cat and brother.

She is thankful for her house and her sister.

He is thankful for his mom and his dad.

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone! Enjoy the special holiday with those that are important to you. This Thanksgiving I have so much to be thankful for. Here a few things that come to mind:

-My wonderful and supportive husband, Andrew

-My loving family

-My amazing job that I love more and more every day

-My brilliant students who amaze me by their curiousity and love for life

-My co-workers who are both encouraging and inspiring

I hope you all have a blessed holiday!

If you're a parent of one of my students, I look forward to seeing you at conferences. We have so much progress to celebrate together.

Sharing and Counting

We have been working on counting to 100 by 1's, 5's and 10's.  So far, the students are doing a fabulous job! We have also been working on our concepts about print skills. Last week we focused on using our pointer fingers as we read.  We continue to work on  our one-to-one correspondence by putting our pointer fingers below each word as we read them.  I decided to combine these activities together by having the students count aloud, pointing to one number at a time.  Check out the video below.

The students are counting by 1's to 100 - they are getting pretty good at it! Sorry the video is crooked. I must have turned my camera without realizing it. I hope it doesn't make you too dizzy.

We practiced sharing some of the stories we are working on during our writing workshop time as well.  The students have been doing such a great job on their sketching, labeling and writing sentences that I wanted to give the class an opportunity to share their work and listen to each other's stories.

Keagan volunteered to read his story.  As you can see, he is off to a great start!

Keep it up my Owl Room friends! You are all incredible and I am so thankful for all of you.

We Are Thankful

We started talking about the first Thanksgiving last week.  The students learned about the Pilgrims, the Native Americans and the Mayflower. We read the story, The Littlest Pilgrim by Brandi Doughtery.  The students and I created a web about Mini, the Littlest Pilgrim.  We used as many adjectives as we could to describer her.  Some of the students pointed out that she was nice and helpful while others noticed that she was a good friend.

After we learned about the first Thanksgiving we thought of things that we are thankful for.  The students did a great job with this.  Some of the students shared that they were thankful for their Lego's and dolls while others said that they were thankful for their family, friends and shelter.

We wrote our ideas on leaves and hung them on our thankful tree.

We also created turkeys using our popcorn words. We have been working on these words for a while so the students picked 6 of our site words and wrote them on the feathers of their turkeys.

 Here are a few more things we are thankful for...

 After learning how to put numbers together and take numbers apart the the students created their own turkey math problems today.

As you can see, the students are doing an awesome job and I am so thankful for each and every one!