Thanksgiving!

Last week we began learning about Thanksgiving. It's my absolute favorite holiday, and the weather is finally cooperating! :)

We started off the week by reading Who Will Carve the Turkey This Thanksgiving? by Jerry Pallotta. The kids and I love all of his books. (We had read Who Will Haunt My House on Halloween? in October, and there are more to come.) After reading the story, the students made connections to the text and created a page for a class book. We thought of which animals might help us carve our turkeys but of all the silly things that could go wrong if they came to our dinners. It was very interesting to see which animals might come over for Thanksgiving!

We also learned about Squanto on PebbleGo. I feel like I'm always commenting on how wonderful PebbleGo is, but I just can't get over it! The students are learning so much about nonfiction texts, and they're so motivated to discover new facts. They really enjoy looking up new words in the glossary and talking about all their new schema. I love seeing those lightbulbs go off each day!

The students really started to understand what Thanksgiving is all about. We talked about how we want to be thankful for the good things in our life. They realized how hard life was for Squanto and the Pilgrims. We talked about different things in our own lives we were thankful for, and then we made a Thankful Quilt to hang in the hallway. We came up with a HUGE list. It was definitely hard for the kiddos to narrow down their absolute favorites. :)

We also read about Samuel Eaton and Sarah Morton, two Pilgrim children. Using a Double Bubble, we compared the lives of boys and girls in Plymouth. The kiddos have been doing a great job of using their thinking skills and explaining their reasoning to others.

We also learned about the first Thanksgiving. This is a great resource that we use each year. It's fun that it is interactive for the kids, and they learn a lot about what life was like for the Pilgrims. We talked about how life was not easy for them, and they left everything they knew to come here to be free. Then the kiddos drew the Mayflower and wrote one thing that they had learned during the week.

Friday was one of my favorite days of the year. We read Stone Soup and watched an online retelling of the story. Then we talked about the importance of sharing with others. I told the students I'd be sharing a special meal with them. We were making (Ms. Stookey's Special) Stone Soup! There were cheers all around. We discussed all the different ingredients from the story, and I shared with them how I was going to add my own favorite things too, to make it extra-special. After we made the soup, the students made a Brace Map for all our ingredients. We had to wait all day for the soup to cook, but we were very patient. It got pretty rave reviews, so that made me happy. :) It was a great day to end a wonderful week.

As for math this week, we've been practicing finding patterns on a hundreds chart. The hundreds chart is one of my favorite tools for math (besides number lines). I am a visual person, and I know lots of our kids are, too. It helps to see all the numbers in order and learn the strategies for adding and subtracting. We played a few fun games with the Airliner. Using this tool seems like fun, but we're secretly practicing all our new skills!

We finished up our science unit on heating and cooling. (Stone Soup fit in perfectly!) We discussed the water cycle and Ms. Coburn found an awesome song online for us! Here it is! We came up with some movements for the song to help us remember what the parts of the water cycle were. I'm sure your kids would love to sing it for you at home. :) We finished our evaporation experiment, too. The students discovered that if a container is not open, the water can't evaporate from it! Instead, the water vapor gets stuck inside and condensates back into the container. We were very excited to learn this fact. They also discovered that if something is shallow and wide, the water in it will evaporate the fastest. (I even had one friend explain to me that the reason it was so cloudy outside was because our water had evaporated into the air and turned into clouds as it condensed. Yay for listening and learning!!!)