**The flu, fever and coughs visited out classroom this week. By Friday, we had 7 students out! We kept to our schedule as much as we could. The students were busy practicing songs for the Winter Concert and sharing their winter traditions and learning about the traditions and celebrations of others around the world. Our 19th Annual Gingerbread Cookie Baking was a small affair, but quite spectacular!! The smell of gingerbread filled the school! The students created cookies that were works of art. Lots of details and lots of sprinkles!!! The students worked together to create and share some of the cookies with each other. Tis the season!! A HUGE THANKS to our great volunteers--Lily's Grandma, Ms. Peterson and Trinity and Mr. Hellman and Ms. Dennis. With plenty of dough and sprinkles let over, I have made some dough/sprinkles and baking directions bags for those students who were absent. Let me know if you need to borrow cookie cutters--I have plenty of those too!
**The Trimester 1 Report Card is in your child's home work folder. If you have any questions or would like to meet to discuss the standards grading system---please email me1
**Come One, Come All to the Kindergarten/Grade1 Winter Concert on Wednesday, December 17th in the Irving Auditorium. The concert will be held 2 times--First performance is at 8:15 am----the second performance is at 9:45 am. The concerts will begin promptly! Go early and get a good seat, especially if you are attending the 8:15 concert. Please come back to the room after each performance for a refreshment reception and crafts. It will be a great time to get together with other families to share conversation and community.
**The students were treated to a performance by the World's Smallest Circus (2 people!) on Tuesday. There was plate juggling, acrobatics, silly skits and spinning tops. Very fun! Check out our own Jaylen spinning plates----who knew!!!
**Please let me know if your child is traveling over the winter break. I will prepare a travel journal for them to take on their travels.
**Our class has a SECRET SNOWFLAKE!!!! We are making some surprises for them. Shhhhh!
**The Irving Craft Fair and Cookie Crumble grows more spectacular every year!!! There were so many things to look at and lots of great buys. What fun!!
**School is closed December 20th-January 4th. Classes resume on Monday, January 5, 2015!!
**Route to Reading Rotation 4 will begin later in January. This will give us time at the beginning of January to do midyear DIBELS Assessments.
**This week in Friendship Club, Ms. Bell Bey conducted voting session where the students got to "vote " for what they wanted to do next Friday. It was MOVIE by a small margin. Ms.Bell Bey and I will be looking over appropriate choices.
**In Mr. Packer Problem Solving this week, Mr. Packer continued to work with the students on subitizing activities using dots in standard and scattered arrays.
This week:
It continues to be about gingerbread, celebrations and traditions. The students did a little research on how the activity of gingerbread making began and why it is so popular this time of year. Ginger was a valuable spice a long time ago traced back to the Greeks and Romans. A cake like treat was made of ginger. As time went on, Europeans began using flour, ginger and other spices to create cookies, houses and cakes. The students listened to a number of gingerbread stories. They examined characters, setting and main events in the stories. They verbally compared and contrasted the characters and the plot. How did end? (eaten...not eaten.) Who were the characters? (boy, man, baby, girls/boys, fox, wolf, coyote.) What happened in the story? They had loads of fun elbow chatting with each other about their observations. The students read about the Jewish celebration of Hanukkah with all its traditions and symbols. They learned how to play the dreidel game. The students also read about Advent and the story of Christmas with all its traditions and symbols. Students are beginning to catch on to the unifying theme of the use of lights in these winter celebrations--candles, strands of lights on trees, the light of the North Star. Station Day activities for this week included creating a candle with glitter and jewels, color by code menorah, working on our number formation books with forms for 6-9 and creating a "geome-tree" using rectangle and triangles to form an evergreen tree.
Reading/Language Arts: The students began Unit 4 Food in our Treasures Reading series. The unit began with a question about where food comes from. The students accessed prior knowledge about stores, farms, markets and orchards as places where food is found. Some students offered that they had gardens in their back yards in the summer. The students listened to the Big Book story, "Apple Farmer Annie." They listened and discussed where Annie lived and her daily activities as an apple farmer. Students made connections on their fall theme about apples, types of apples and what you can make with apples. Other students talked about the time they went went a farmer's market and bought apples and apple cider. Our target words are to and have. We have added these to our growing number of sight words. Our target letter and sound is Nn. The students reviewed the use of nouns and action words or verbs. Our Robust Vocabulary this week included FARMER, MARKET, INGREDIENTS, COMBINE, NUTRITIOUS. The students used their elkonin boxes to segment and blend 3 and 4 sound words. The students continue their work on recognizing consonant blends and digraphs. The students read their pre decodable story, "Can Nan?" They made predictions about story content. Students answered questions about the events in the story and then practiced reading the story to a partner for fluency development. The students listened to the vocabulary story, "Pizza Please." They had lots of fun activating their own prior knowledge about making their own homemade pizza, comparing and contrasting the ways and ingredients families use to make pizza. Some students had never made pizza but said they ordered it from a pizza place. The students learned that the dough comes from wheat grown on a farm, the sauce from tomatoes grown many places and cheese made from cow's milk. Workstations this week included using leveled readers to chat about story elements, creating word pies using CVC patterns, elbow chatting about the main idea of their selected story and about how foods grow, writing a sentence about what you like to do (action word), draw and label a food you like and write a sentence about it, read it and add to it-write about what could happen next, playing Roll, Write and Read and Feeling Foods--reach your hand in the bag....pull out a food....chat about it.....write about it and walking your words.
Math: The students continue to rote count to 85. They also continue to work on number formation rhymes for 6-9. The students are creating a number formation book for practice. We did a group lesson on counting on from a random number between 0-50 and higher between 50-100! We also played a group game about finding the 3 numbers BEFORE and 3 numbers AFTER a given number. In student workshop this week, students counted gingerbread men and recorded the number, learned to play the "Roll a Gingerbread Man," reviewed teen numbers with ten frames, wrote numbers 0-50, discussed and recorded the numbers that completed their number bond 0-5, reinforced recognition of pattern block shapes and worked with partners on the app Starfall Gingerbread--following and continuing a pattern.
Writing: The students finished up formal instruction on Starting Corner Capitals and began work on Magic "C" Capitals. They applied what they learned in their orange practice books. The students began work on a writing project about a gingerbread person. They are creating their own gingerbread person and are going to describe in writing their creation. The students came up with a list of describing words to use. Stay tuned!!
Technology: In the area of reading, student small groups and individual students used the apps, Montessori Crossword, Spelling Bug and Rocket Speller to listen and record letter sounds to create words (3-4-5 phonemes/sounds) recorded reading with iTalk for fluency, The app Sound Sort continues to assist individual students with sound/symbol connections. In the area of math, whole group instruction continued with the apps Subitize Tree and Number Rack. Students small groups used the apps Number Find and Easy Match for counting and cardinality as well as finding number using base ten strategies. The students partnered up to play Monster Squeeze using numbers 1-30.
Literature: "Hanukkah Counting Book," Diane Goode's "American Christmas Poems," "Counting Lions," "A Picture Book of Hanukkah," "Zero is the Leaves on a Tree," "Bake, Mice, Bake," "The Gingerbread Man," "The Gingerbread Bear," "The Gingerbread Man," "The Gingerbread Baby," "The Gingerbread Cowboy," "The Gingerbread Kid," "The Gingerbread Boy," "The Gingerbread Pirates," "Gingerbread Friends," "Bad Kitty Christmas, " "This is the Star," "Room for a Little One," "Winter Celebration Around the World."
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