Hello everyone! Here’s the scoop on our week…
Social Studies:
Can you feel the holiday energy building?? We sure can! The kids are abuzz with excitement about upcoming celebrations. This week we have channeled that energy into our study of Hanukkah and Kwanzaa.
Studying Hanukkah, we read several books about the stories and traditions of the holidays, including Light the Lights; The Miracle of Hanukkah; and Happy Hanukkah, Curious George. We made a fun Hanukkah menorah craft out of construction paper, using Popsicle sticks and tissue paper as candles.
For our study of Kwanzaa, we read several books as well, including A Kwanzaa Miracle and an awesome pop-up book called A Kwanzaa Celebration. We used colorful strips of construction paper to weave our own “kente” cloth, a symbol of heritage that is used in the form of a "mkeka" (placemat), placed under the cup and fruit displayed during Kwanzaa.
Literacy:
This week we reviewed the letters W, Y, and V. Our sight word was “who.” With all the craziness of Buddies, the Winter Concert, the special Coding Activity in the library, and working on our special secret holiday gift for you parents, we did not get to start our new rotation of Literacy Workstations, so we will do that next week instead. We also have been enjoying reading a chapter book together as a class… Flat Stanley's Worldwide Adventures: The Japanese Ninja Surprise. Thanks to Ana for bringing this book from home to share with us! Speaking of Flat Stanley, our first Flat Student returned to the class this week as well! Flat Ella brought us lots of post-cards, photos, and information about her adventures in Boca Raton, FL. We’re looking forward to welcoming the rest of our Flat Students back to class in the weeks to come!
Many of the students went home with books today, to read aloud to an adoring audience of parents, siblings, and/or friends. ;P Please plan to return to this book (within it’s plastic bag!) to your child’s backpack after he/she finishes reading it, so we can collect them again on Monday.
Math:
This week we focused on addition number stories and recorded them with counters and the addition symbol. The children had a piece of paper with the addition symbol down the middle and put counters on each side of the symbol as they listened to Mrs K tell number stories. We learnt that addition sums start from the left! After some modeling the children took turns in telling their own numbers stories while the rest of their friends recorded them with their counters. Maybe they can tell you some of their fun addition stories… we had stories about everything from people to apples, ducks and frogs!!
We have also practiced interrupted counting this week. This is where you continue counting by 1’s from a given number other than 1. Examples of starting points would be 19, 20, 21 or 35, 36, 37 etc. Try this out at home!
We finished off our Math Station rotation and will be starting another next week. The children were great at finding shapes around the room and making graphs to represent what they had found. They also enjoyed measuring things with paperclips. They found it took quite a few to measure glue sticks but not nearly as many to measure our little pencils. We thought about measuring each other with them, but we would need way too many paperclips for that!
In other news:
A HUGE “thank you!” to Hilary Nelson and Virginia Kyle, who were a super-charged, super-hero level team working on our special secret surprise gift for the parents! The gifts turned out SO PRECIOUS, and we appreciate their hard work and artistic inspiration very much. Watch for these special items coming home soon!
Big thanks to Kol’s mom Jennifer, who did a hilarious job reading The Pout-Pout Fish to the class as our Mystery Reader! We also owe thanks to Kol’s dad as well, who came in to teach the kids about sleep and the brain. We discussed how mysterious sleep is -- that one moment we are awake and thinking, and what seems like the next moment we wake up and it is morning -- and some cool facts too, like the fact that getting enough sleep is extra important, because it is when kids grow!
This week we also got to do a cool technology activity in the library, in honor of the global Hour of Code event this week. We turned our whole class into a living computer, and wrote code to get from one side of the room to the other… super cool!
Last but not least, we had a great time with our Big Buddies this week, making strings of snowflakes out of coffee filters and discussing our favorite holiday traditions. It is sweet to see the growing friendships developing between the Big and Little Buddies as we spend more time together!
Social Studies:
Can you feel the holiday energy building?? We sure can! The kids are abuzz with excitement about upcoming celebrations. This week we have channeled that energy into our study of Hanukkah and Kwanzaa.
Studying Hanukkah, we read several books about the stories and traditions of the holidays, including Light the Lights; The Miracle of Hanukkah; and Happy Hanukkah, Curious George. We made a fun Hanukkah menorah craft out of construction paper, using Popsicle sticks and tissue paper as candles.
For our study of Kwanzaa, we read several books as well, including A Kwanzaa Miracle and an awesome pop-up book called A Kwanzaa Celebration. We used colorful strips of construction paper to weave our own “kente” cloth, a symbol of heritage that is used in the form of a "mkeka" (placemat), placed under the cup and fruit displayed during Kwanzaa.
Literacy:
This week we reviewed the letters W, Y, and V. Our sight word was “who.” With all the craziness of Buddies, the Winter Concert, the special Coding Activity in the library, and working on our special secret holiday gift for you parents, we did not get to start our new rotation of Literacy Workstations, so we will do that next week instead. We also have been enjoying reading a chapter book together as a class… Flat Stanley's Worldwide Adventures: The Japanese Ninja Surprise. Thanks to Ana for bringing this book from home to share with us! Speaking of Flat Stanley, our first Flat Student returned to the class this week as well! Flat Ella brought us lots of post-cards, photos, and information about her adventures in Boca Raton, FL. We’re looking forward to welcoming the rest of our Flat Students back to class in the weeks to come!
Many of the students went home with books today, to read aloud to an adoring audience of parents, siblings, and/or friends. ;P Please plan to return to this book (within it’s plastic bag!) to your child’s backpack after he/she finishes reading it, so we can collect them again on Monday.
Math:
This week we focused on addition number stories and recorded them with counters and the addition symbol. The children had a piece of paper with the addition symbol down the middle and put counters on each side of the symbol as they listened to Mrs K tell number stories. We learnt that addition sums start from the left! After some modeling the children took turns in telling their own numbers stories while the rest of their friends recorded them with their counters. Maybe they can tell you some of their fun addition stories… we had stories about everything from people to apples, ducks and frogs!!
We have also practiced interrupted counting this week. This is where you continue counting by 1’s from a given number other than 1. Examples of starting points would be 19, 20, 21 or 35, 36, 37 etc. Try this out at home!
We finished off our Math Station rotation and will be starting another next week. The children were great at finding shapes around the room and making graphs to represent what they had found. They also enjoyed measuring things with paperclips. They found it took quite a few to measure glue sticks but not nearly as many to measure our little pencils. We thought about measuring each other with them, but we would need way too many paperclips for that!
In other news:
A HUGE “thank you!” to Hilary Nelson and Virginia Kyle, who were a super-charged, super-hero level team working on our special secret surprise gift for the parents! The gifts turned out SO PRECIOUS, and we appreciate their hard work and artistic inspiration very much. Watch for these special items coming home soon!
Big thanks to Kol’s mom Jennifer, who did a hilarious job reading The Pout-Pout Fish to the class as our Mystery Reader! We also owe thanks to Kol’s dad as well, who came in to teach the kids about sleep and the brain. We discussed how mysterious sleep is -- that one moment we are awake and thinking, and what seems like the next moment we wake up and it is morning -- and some cool facts too, like the fact that getting enough sleep is extra important, because it is when kids grow!
This week we also got to do a cool technology activity in the library, in honor of the global Hour of Code event this week. We turned our whole class into a living computer, and wrote code to get from one side of the room to the other… super cool!
Last but not least, we had a great time with our Big Buddies this week, making strings of snowflakes out of coffee filters and discussing our favorite holiday traditions. It is sweet to see the growing friendships developing between the Big and Little Buddies as we spend more time together!