HaPpY ThAnKsGiViNg!!!

We were learning about hibernation and migration today!!! We made a flying V :) :) 

We also worked on reading numeral words. Your child is bringing home a pie/math game tonight! If you have dice....just roll the dice and then put that 'number word' in and keep going until you have a whole pie :) 

Happy, happy 1/2 birthday to you Eve! You are a special, confident and fun loving little girl :) I hope you enjoyed your day today!!! 

Is that Eric Carle I see??????? YAY! 

Happy Monday!!!!

We read the book, Frederick and hung him up in our window! It's very cold outside and many animals are starting to hibernate. Brrr.....it's chilly! What a great chunk to learn! Brody and Bryanna both start with this chunk too! 

Here are some fun and fabulous game day pictures! THANK YOU for sending in so many fun and classic games. We all had fun...including the teachers!!! 

(this was Miss Dunker's favorite) :) :) 

Stuff That We're Thankful For...

Happy, happy Friday!

I just had to share this sweet picture with you! Our classroom aide, Mrs. (Beverly) Minnich, is so wonderful with all of your children. Here is a snapshot of her playing with the children. She's never afraid to get right down on the floor with them. They are building a flower and vegetable garden! What fun way to build vocabulary :) :) Thanks for all you do Mrs. Minnich! You are a HUGE part of the success that these kiddos have! 

Happy, happy 1/2 birthday to Noah today! He knows when his actual bday is and so does his very young (and adorable) sister....Miriam. What a sweet family! I'm so happy you all could come! 

Some small math group work...

Eve's mom, Jenay, helped us out by making these awesome and useful number tracks! They can be used over and over again with many different numbers.

We practice counting forward and backward and we work on number before/number after! 

Happy Wednesday!!

Brrr! It's really cold out there this morning. Goodness. I hope everyone brought warm gear today!
Anyway....here we are doing clipboard writing. It's a way to encourage children to practice their spelling skills as well as working well with others. I give them a very risky word and they segment the sounds. Then they write up to 3 guesses on how to spell the word and decide, as a team, which guess looks the closest. They recorded their guesses on the whiteboard. Then we looked for smart things that the groups tried. 

Our word was Thanksgiving. We noticed some groups started their word with the /f/ sound, while others did th! Wow! 

Oh goodness! It looks like we've started up our own turkey farm in the library! 

Here is a snapshot of their spelling attempts (in the lower left hand corner). I try to pull words out of different print sources....like magazines. We worked on the --ank word family and will do more with it today! 

Happy Tuesday!

Reagan is another friend who brought a book from home that she could read independently. Very fun! Watch for the video...

We have built up our stamina during reading workshop/Daily 5 to 15 minutes each day. So I taught them a new choice. It's called 'Read to Someone.' We learned how to sit EEKK (elbow/elbow/knee/knee) on our bellies or bottoms. We pick one book and do I read, you read.

Natalee made it onto our How Did You Do It math strategy wall. What good advice Natalee! Counting that bigger number first will eventually lead into counting on.

We can do the turkey trot! We'll be making big turkeys this morning too! 

Thought this was interesting. We had a short discussion about the word trot in our morning sentence. They were thinking it started with a j or a ch. 

Here is a sample of our beautiful front cover to the book It's Snowing, by Oliva Dunrea. We're practicing visualizing. 

Our venn diagram about tame turkeys vs. wild turkeys! 

Happy Monday!

Yesterday we learned how to do the turkey trot! We had a cook (aka-Clara) who chased us around and into the pot we went :) We learned about tame turkeys that live on the farm and how they're different than wild turkeys. 

Here are some friends reading some of their stories to us! We are really starting to develop as writers. Some things most of the children are working on are....
*When to use capital letters

*Putting a stop at the end of a sentence
*Segmenting the sounds in words and writing down the letters
*Writing with snap words
*Thinking of a true story

Layla wrote a true story about her mom going to work! We even started a Stories We Can't WAIT to Write About chart to put sticky notes on for all of those times we come up with great ideas :) 

Here are some snapshots of us visualizing. I am reading them a story called, Snow by Olivia Dunrea. I am not showing them the pictures. They are listening carefully to the details, making mental images and drawing whatever they're visualizing. The story has really great describing words like this: It was a dark, dark, cold, cold night. 

Since the story reminded us of cold weather....we turned on the fireplace ;) 

Happy BIRTHDAY to Nora! You are a sweet, intelligent, well spoken and charismatic young lady! We all hope you had a great birthday :)