Dr. Seuss and Other Things

This week was all about Dr. Seuss. Since we're having our parade next week, we wanted to celebrate this fabulous author! I've also incorporated a few creative book report projects into our Dr. Seuss study so that the kids can start getting some great ideas for their Texas Readers' project.

Tuesday we read The Sneetches then created a mobile to go with the story. We made sure to look at the rubric so we could get a 100 on our projects! These turned out great, and it really helped the kids start getting some good ideas for their projects.

Wednesday we read Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose and created a bookmark. We checked our rubric again, just to make sure we'd get a 100! I think the kids are really understanding what we're expecting from their Texas Readers' project. I've been very impressed with how well these projects are turning out.

Thursday we researched about Dr. Seuss himself. We read about him on PebbleGo and talked about what we knew about him from our prior schema. The kids knew quite a bit! I heard Mrs. Waterbury did an author study in Library this week, too. We sure love Dr. Seuss!

Friday we read There's a Wocket in my Pocket and made a page for a class book. We had fun creating fictional Dr. Seuss-like characters.

I can't wait for our Dr. Seuss parade next Friday. Parents are welcome to come! Our class will be dressing up as Thidwick. Please wear brown clothes (or any other moose-like colors if you don't have brown). We'll be making antler headbands and giant hearts in class to go with our outfits. I know we'll look great! :)

In science we finished up our seasons unit and started talking about weather. As a mini-assessment, I had the students draw a picture of a certain season. They had to draw the picture well enough so the class could guess their season by just seeing their drawing. This was very fun, and I was able to see who really understood seasons!

We also finished up our money unit this week. Here's a book that we made in class. It goes along with our money song that we've been singing. I hope your little ones have come home to teach you the song! It really helps them remember the values of the coins. Make sure you ask your kids about "hairy money" too. It helps them add up the values of the coins. We had lots of fun with it!

I'm very excited for next week. With Go Texan day last Friday and rodeo in full-swing, we are going to be starting our Texas unit (surprise, surprise it's my favorite!). We started working on some fun projects Friday and we'll be finishing them next week. They'll be on display at Open House, so I'm very excited for the next couple weeks! :)

Mittens & Things

Wow, I can't believe we're almost halfway through the year! It's been so nice this week to see everyone's bright and well-rested faces. :) This week was all about winter (although more of the fun snowy kind, less of the Texas rainy kind).

We started off by reading The Mitten by Jan Brett. As the kids know, she is one of my all-time favorite authors! She also illustrates all of her stories and is just all-around amazing! We talked about genres and how this is a folktale so she is just retelling the story to us in her own way. They loved it. Of course I forgot to take a picture of our finished projects because I'm so out of habit of photographing everything! Here's what the animals looked like.

We also read The Hat by Jan Brett which is another folktale. Then we used a Double Bubble to talk about the similarities and differences in the books. The kids made a ton of great connections to the other texts we've been reading as well as to themselves.

Our class wrote about their winter breaks and created some adorable little people to go with their writing. We sat in a circle and all shared our favorite things first. It was wonderful hearing how much people love their families and friends. Of course we all got to talk about our new fun  presents, too! :) Gotta love the honesty that comes from a 6 year old!

We also did a writing activity after reading The Jacket I Wear in the Snow. After reading the story we talked about all the wonderful adjectives we had read. We reviewed how adjectives make stories more exciting, and life is pretty boring without them! The kids colored a person, then wrote about what he was wearing using wonderful descriptive adjectives.

This week we created mittens to play a mitten concentration game. We rolled dice to create math facts on one mitten then we put its answer on the other mitten. The kids played concentration to make pairs.

In Social Studies this week we've been reviewing rules. It was a long two weeks away from school, but I'm glad to report that most everyone has remembered proper school etiquette! With the new ClassDojo in place, I think we're all excited to gain tons of points throughout the day. We've realized it's even better than the color chart because you can keep adding and adding and adding! I split the kids up into groups to brainstorm the different rules we have for different parts of the school. Then we made a giant Tree Map with all of their rules. They worked great with their teams!

ClassDojo has been awesome. I absolutely love it, and I think the kids do too! Like I've said, there is no limit for how many points they can get so I think that it's even better than the color chart. The kids can hear the sound on the computer and see what people are getting points for and why points are being lost. Any feedback from you is appreciated, too. I've gotten some good comments from a couple parents already! Here's our weekly breakdown. We had a great percentage. I'm one happy teacher!

All in all, it was a wonderful week back! I did miss the firsties, but boy am I exhausted! Stay tuned for the exciting things next week. It's one of my favorite things we do all year! :)

Gingerbread Week

The holiday season is in full-force! This week was all about gingerbread.

One day we read The Gingerbread Man and retold the story, focusing on using our sequencing words. The kids are doing a wonderful job of remember which sequencing words to use. All our practice has really paid off! We read another version of the story and talked about the differences between the tales and why they exist. We discussed folk tales and how stories used to be told by word, so people changed them over time.

We also read The Gingerbread Girl which is a cute story about the Gingerbread Boy's wiser sister. We did a Double Bubble as a whole group to discuss the similarities and differences between the two different stories.

We created gingerbread men in disguise during writing time, then the kiddos used Tree Maps to create sentences to tell about their gingerbread men. They're still doing a good job of using the Tree Map to createa  full sentence, starting with a capital and ending with a period. These disguises turned out to be pretty cute!

During math one day, we created a gingerbread glyph. The students used a sheet of paper to describe themselves, then they used the directions to create their very own gingerbread person! This is a great way to learn about each other and the different things we like, the differences in our families, etc. We had a good time discussing all the things that we had in common!

One day we learned about the moon phases and created a cute project to go with it. I'd seen it on Pinterest, but it originally came from here. The kids loved how it was "almost like magic!" to watch the moon change from phase to phase. We researched moon phases on PebbleGo and talked about how the moon is ALWAYS in the sky, we just don't always see it. We were pretty amazed by that fact. :)

For Social Studies, we have been studying fables. This ties into our studies about families and traditions. There were a lot of great fables on My Capstone Library, so we were able to listen to the stories online. Very fun! The helper even used the Airliner to go through the pages for me, so I could work on our Tree Map. :) We thought about each fable we read and the lesson that we learned. Our class discovered that many fables teach us the same lessons, so those lessons must be pretty important. We had a great time reading the stories and learning how to make good choices!

We had another fabulous week. Thank you SO much for all the parents who donated to Toys for Tots. We've been talking about giving to those less fortunate, so it was great to be able to tie that into our lessons. Can't wait to see everyone tomorrow!

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!!!)