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!

Pumpkin Centers

Since we had our Halloween Party after the Penny Carnival on October 26th we celebrated October 31st with a pumpkin themed afternoon.

Several parents and grandparents came in to our classroom to help me with our pumpkin themed centers.  Thank you so much to all of you who helped! I appreciate your patience and energy while working with the students and I.  We loved having you with us!

One of the centers required the students to measure the height and width of their pumpkin using unifex cubes.   

 It was fun to see the students make observations and compare the different pumpkins.

At another center, the students looked inside of a pumpkin and predicted how many seeds there were.  I bought a little pumpkin thinking that there wouldn't be very many seeds inside but I'm pretty sure that little pumpkins have way more seeds than big pumpkins.  I was surprised to see that there were so many seeds inside!
Does anyone know if this is true? :)

The students also predicted if the pumpkins would sink or float in water.  Some of the students guessed right but most of the class was surprised to see that the pumpkins floated in water!

Thanks again Owl Room family and friends! I appreciate all your help with the Penny Carnival, the Halloween Party and our Pumpkin Centers.  I couldn't have done any of these activities without your help. I know your lives are busy but I want you to know that I appreciate all you do for your child and our classroom on a daily basis. Enjoy the long weekend - I know I will!

The Big Red Barn

October was a great month, filled with so many exciting things.  Here are a few pictures of what our classroom has been up to lately.

Like most woman I know, I am obsessed with Target.  It's definitely a weakness. It doesn't matter what day it is, I can walk in there looking for toothpaste and walk out with 100 more things (and an empty wallet - but that's besides the point)!

One of the things I love about Target is their dollar section.  One of my teaching partners and I hit up the dollar section at Target recently.  We decided to share and trade some of the gizmo's and gadgets that we found.  I decided to hide some of the items in our classroom's rice table.  I told the class that I buried a Halloween treasure for them to find.  They were excited to find pumpkins, ghosts and spiders inside.

During our pretend play time, a few students re-created a grocery store scene.  Liliana was the cashier, Madison was bagging the items on the conveyor belt and Gabe was a dad pretending to shop for groceries.  I love their creativity and ability to work together.

We continue to work on making predictions, connections and retelling what stories are about. This week I read the story, The Three Little Pigs to the students and we re-created the story using these paper puppets.  The kids did a great job retelling what happened in the story by changing their voice, using facial expression, and body gestures.

Julia is pretending to be the big bad wolf.

We continue to work on writing our first and last names and knowing our personal information (parents' names, phone number, birthday, etc.)  This week we rainbow-traced our first and last names and our phone numbers.  We also learned that everyone's phone number is different depending upon what type of phone they have and where they live.

We began our writing workshop a few weeks ago but this week I really started to see some of the students make huge gains.  We practiced writing sentences on our chalkboards and learned that authors write books.  We have been practicing being authors in our classroom. So far, we learned that authors follow these steps for writing:

1- Think about what you want to write about

2- Say the story aloud

3- Sketch your picture

4- Label your picture

5 - Write the words

We also learned that we should not give up when we come to a word that we don't know how to write. We never give up! We simply say the word slowly and write the letter sounds we hear.  This is definitely a skill we continue to work on but I am so proud of the progress that the kids are making.

This is a sample of one of the stories Julia wrote about.  As you can see, she is doing an awesome job!

Milaya decided to write about the pumpkin patch, as well.  I love the level of thought behind her story.  She wrote about the pumpkins and gourds they picked and she even told us about the wagon ride. Amazing!

I stole this activity from my teaching partner, Jen.  We have been working on beginning sounds and rhyming so we sang this together.  I changed the beginning sounds and rhymes with post-its several times (ex: it starts with 'f' and rhymes with 'charmer'... what do you think it could be? farmer!) and the students loved it.  I suppose it helps that my students live in Zeeland - we all have a little schema about farms and what lives on a farm! :)