Oh the Things Santa Can Help Us Learn!

We finished our needs and wants unit by writing a Christmas wish list. Before writing their list, we practiced stretching out words and writing the sounds we hear. Then students wrote/illustrated three things they want for Christmas. They shared their list with their partner and then identified the items on their list as needs or wants and explained how they knew the item was a need or want. We created a Santa glyph to compare Santa family traditions such as if they write a letter to Santa or not, if they leave him cookies/milk, or not, etc. Then we collected the data from our glyphs and compared using more/less/same as. 

Gingerbread Man Learning Fun

We read several different versions of The Gingerbread Man and we compared and contrasted the different versions of the story. We created a story map that included characters, setting, and key events for Deanna Jump's Gingerbreadman story. We also acted the story out. We also used our five senses to identify sensory details in the story and charted the words that helped us to see, hear, taste, touch, and smell details in the story. We also wrote a Gingerbread poem and created Gingerbread men glyphs. 

We did an experiment with a Gingerbread Man cookie to figure out why he didn't swim across the river himself. We put a cookie in a cup of water and recorded our hypothesis.

We recorded what the cookie looked like when 20 minutes had passed.

 We recorded what the cookie looked like after an hour and wrote/illustrated our conclusion.

Of course, we enjoyed eating gingerbread man cookies.

Thanksgiving

We read Sarah Morton's Day and then compared us life with the Pilgrims' life. 

We created turkey glyphs and then collected, analyzed, and graphed our data.

We tasted turkey and graphed whether or not we like to eat it, and we also tasted cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie and graphed which was our favorite Thanksgiving food. 

Halloween is for Learning

We read Where's My Mummy? and wrote text to self connections about what we do when we're scared. We also discussed characteristics of circles and ovals and compared/contrasted circles and ovals on a double bubble map. We cut circles and ovals from squares and rectangles to create Baby Mummy.

We read The Bumpy Little Pumpkin and wrote text to self connections about how we are special.

We My Friend Frankie by Deanna Jump and then discussed characteristics of good friends. We created a bubble map about Frankie and used our bubble map to write poems about Frankie. We collected and analyzed data about class by making a Frankie glyph, sorting our ourselves by answering the questions, and then graphing the results.

Oh the Things You Can Learn with Cupcakes!!!

We read If You Give a Cat a Cupcake. We talked about how heat causes change. We made cupcakes and wrote and illustrated the cupcakes before and after we baked them.

We made a cupcake glyph to answer the following questions: What is your favorite kind of cupcake? How old are you? Do you like baking?.

We learned about a baker's job and decorated our cupcakes.

We illustrated and order the events from the story.

We wrote how to decorate a cupcake.

Then we ate our cupcakes!

Dino-Mite Learning

We used dinosaurs to review concepts we learned this year. In science, we reviewed characteristics of reptiles and discussed how dinosaurs are like a system. We discussed the purpose of their parts. We also reviewed life cycles and compared and contrasted herbivores with carnivores. Two science vocab words that have been the science word of the week recently.

In math, we told addition and subtraction stories using dino fruit snacks. We created dino positional patterns. We read How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight? and then discussed bedtime routines and acted two out a time and used comparative language to describe the length of time each activity took. We also drew our favorite dinosaur and used different manipulatives to find the length and area of our dinosaurs. Then we compared with our partner. We also made dinosaur glyphs to answer the following questions: Do you like carnivores or herbivores best? Did you like the book Dinosaur Roar! or Dinosaurumpus best? Do you think dinosaurs are creepy or cool? We graphed the answers for the class all together. Then students went to their seats and graphed the answers for their table.

In social studies, we learned about the job of paleontologists. We watched two different Discovery Streaming videos about their job. We also excavated chocolate chips from cookies. We created a concept anchor chart to show what we knew and what we learned.

In language arts, our focus poem was about dinosaurs. We clapped to the rhythm of the poem. We looked for rhyming words, word family words, helpful chunks, and word wall words. We acted out our poem. We did dinosaur word wall words where we stomped like dinos as we chanted the letters and then roared the words.

Snowman Skills

This week we had a lot of fun integrating snowmen into the concepts and skills we worked on. In Language Arts, we read The Smallest Snowman and Snowmen at Night. Then we wrote and illustrated text to self connections. We also read There Was a Cold Lady who Swallowed Some Snow and created a story by writing and illustrating the characters, setting, problem, and solution in our reader's notebooks. We also played a word wall game where students found the word I told them written on a snowman. Then they swatted the snowman with the sun to "melt" him. We sequenced the pictures and sentences from our big book The Snowman. We made paper snowman lanterns to response to our poem Little Snowman.

In Social Studies, we talked about put events in chronological order. We talked about what happens to snowmen when the sun comes out. Then we illustrated a snowman melting. Then students used their pictures to tell the order of events to their partner. We also looked at pictures of snowmen from the books we read this week and talked about the different clothing items they wore. We discussed how those items meet our need for protection from the cold. The kids made an prediction that when the sun comes out, the clothing would probably help the snowman melt faster.

In Math, we read There Was a Cold Lady who Swallowed Some Snow and created a flow map of events. Then we used ordinal language to help retell the story events. We also illustrated and labeled the events from the story using ordinal numbers. We The First Day of Winter and then created snowmen glyphs in Pixie 2 about our winter activities preferences. We also analyzed and graphed our data from the glyphs in Excel as a class. We made and drank Snowman soup. Then we created a flow map of events. We wrote the ordinal numbers interactively and retold the steps with our partner.
There Was a Cold Lady who Swallowed Some Snow

Snowman Soup



Thanksgiving

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First Week of School

I'm super excited about this class and proud of how smoothly the first week of school went! Thank you parents for waiting patiently at dismissal so I could dismiss the students one at a time.

We have started learning our procedures and routines in our classroom. We learned about PAW Pride and how we are to act in the cafeteria, hallways, restrooms, and at recess. We explored with the some of the different math manipulatives we will be using this year.

In science, we learned about our five senses and how they help us learn about the world around us. We used our sense of touch to feel objects in socks and guess what they were. We smelled different scents in baggies and guessed what they were. We tasted pickles, pretzel sticks, and chocolate chips. We learned about where we taste salty, sweet, sour, and bitter on our tongues. We also learned a song about our five senses.

We read The Kissing Hand and made a kissing hand for our parents on the first day. We read Miss Bindergarten Gets Ready for Kindergarten and took pictures for our class book  Mrs. Shaw Gets Ready for Kindergarten.

We sang The Wheels on the Bus and then made our own buses and wrote how our buses would go through the town.

We ate Hershey's chocolate bars and then cut out the word he or she from the wrapper and used it graph the number of boys and girls in our class. We also used our graph to figure out how many total students we have in our class.

We created ourselves using a glyph code. We colored our pieces according to what we liked best from the questions we were given. Then we talked to a partner about how our glyphs were the same and different. We learned a lot about each other!