Welcome Cayd

We will have another new student. Cayd will be starting school on Monday. We are very excited to meet him and can’t wait!

Kansas Day!

We have been busy this week learning about about Kansas.  We have learned what the state mammal, amphibian, reptile, flower, tree, insect and bird are. We have been making an art job to go with each one.  Some are more elaborate that others.  This is to help us remember what they look like.  We may finish up some of these activities next week.  At centers we unscrambled sentences about Kansas, measured sunflowers, graphed a mystery picture (of a honeybee- our state insect), stamped the symbols, put the symbols in ABC order and wrote a sentence for each. Some of our centers also had us practice sorting short o and long and short u pictures and writing them in groups.  In our free time we have been looking at maps of Kansas and putting puzzles of the USA together. We have been very busy!!

   

Snow and Mitten Fun!

This week was a busy week. Since last week was so short we had a to play catch-up.  Our theme this week was mittens take from the stories The Mitten and The Hat by Jan Brett. We love these books!  We sequenced the events in them, compared the stories, and used the characters in math problems.  At centers we did Mitten Addition by using our cool double dice and an addition/subtraction dice. We also sorted mittens by attributes (color, shape, size). When we were done we colored a tricky picture by the code. It had us practice our number sense.  We also practiced counting by 10’s and ones to make numbers. This center was harder than I thought it would be. In addition, we worked on compound words, number order, and contractions. We were very busy. On Friday we painted snowmen. The kids has so much fun because the paint was textured with sparkles. It was the highlight of the week!  Here are pictures of the snowmen in the hall.  I hope everyone has a great three day weekend.  It is such a busy month! 

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Christmas

Oops. I forgot to publish this before I left for Christmas Break!! The week before Christmas we were busy learning about Christmas traditions around the world. At centers our activities included working more on our math facts, short vowels, and with money. 

On the Friday before break we had Polar Express day. We dressed in our PJ’s and brought pillows and blankets to get comfortable. We did lots of fun activities with the story. We made our own train, necklaces with bells and sequenced the story. We also got to eat donuts and hot chocolate.  It was a great day!  Sadly, it was Marco’s last day. We will miss him but we hope he has a great time at his new school.   

Christmas Centers

This week our centers were tricky.  Candy Cane counting has patterns on candy canes that we had to fill in. This was tricky as some of the patterns were counting by 1’s from a random number and some were counting by 2’s, 5’s or 10’s.  We also did gingerbread problem solving. We rolled dice and had to write addition or subtraction sentences depending upon what the sign dice showed. We also working on ABC order some more. This continues to be tricky for some of us especially when we have more than one word that begins with a letter. We also graphed candy canes by color and then had to add them up.  We had fun Christmas tree cards and used them to make number sentences.   Our listening center this week was There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Bell. After we listened to the story we had to sequence it.  Whew. It was a busy week at centers!  

Reindeer Day!

Today we spent the day learning facts about Reindeer. We read a book and did several small books ourselves. We were surprised by all that we learned. We also made antlers to wear and got reindeer food to leave out. It was a busy day!!

Gingerbread Men

This week has all been about The Gingerbread Man. We have read so many great versions of this book this week.  Some of our favorites were The Gingerbread Baby and the follow up Gingerbread Friends both by Jan Brett.  At centers we worked on making complete sentences with punctuation. We all logged onto Jan Brett’s site and built gingerbread houses on the computer.  One of the trickiest center this week was sorting words into nouns, adjectives, and verbs.  Other centers had us sort words into word families, adding two numbers, writing addition sentences in fact families and adding using a number line.  We had a lot of fun.  For seat work this week one of the hardest jobs was sequencing the pictures of The Gingerbread man and then writing a version to match.   We have been busy!! 

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