Peep! Peep!

If you haven't heard by now, our class has some baby chicks that hatched.  We have a total of 6 chicks in our classroom!  It is very exciting.  Probably some time this next week I will be sending home permission slips for our lottery draw.  We didn't have quite as many hatch as I was hoping, so it looks like we will have three families that will get picked to have 2 chicks each.

With our egg hatching life cycle study, we have been doing a lot of learning about chickens and what they need in life.  The students have been keeping a journal of observations and questions that have come up since the eggs were incubating in the room up to now where we have our baby chicks.

It has been a while since I have had time to post so I will do a quick picture catch-up so that you can see how we celebrated earth day at school.  All of the students in kindergarten made an earth day hat.  We also made a quick and easy paper kite for our kite flying festival part of our Earth Day Celebration.  The recycled art projects that came in were great and very creative!

Recycled Art Lamp

Recycled Art robot

Recycling Assembly presented by Ms. Parker's 5th Grade Class

Let's Go Fly a Kite!

During our Jobs and Choices time we have had a couple of new Choices introduced and the class has had a great time with them.  We have a couple of LED Lite Brites now and it is very exciting to see the kids spell their names in the light bulbs and make pictures.  

We have also experienced cloud dough (named so because of how soft it is), lacing cards, board games, and perler beads.  It is always fun for me to bring in a new sensory item to the class.  Some of the sensory items are a huge hit with everyone, while others are only exciting for some of the students.  The lacing cards are a great practice for fine motor skills and the class really liked to "sew."  I got a couple of board games for the class, including "Candy Land" and "Cootie."  This has been such a great way to help with turn-taking, rule-following, and cooperativeness in our classroom.  Another fine motor activity has been the perler beads where the students put the beads onto the templates in order to create different designs... these are definitely tricky for little hands and big hands alike!

Fun with Pattern Block Shapes!

Playing Candy Land!

We finished our P.E. unit of T-Ball and did a final game with Ms. Brown's class to put our practiced skills to the test.  Now we will be starting relay races and games for the month of May.

in-field

out-field

We also have finished our unit in math on basic subtraction.  We have talked about how subtraction means to take-away.  One of our favorite learning videos for this subject is here:

Here the class has taken sticks of 10 cubes and broken them into two groups.  The class discovered that there are many ways to take 10 apart!

Telling a subtraction story! 10 - 2 = ?

With the end of the month we also had an Awesome Attendance and Character Trait Assembly!  We had two students from our class that were very successful with last month's character trait of perseverance.  Congratulations for always trying and never giving up!

 

Our other focus over the last 2 weeks has been SIGHT WORDS!  We have been doing Sight Word Boot Camp for 2 weeks now and the class seems to be enjoying it.  Because all students learn at different levels, we have 4 groups in our class for boot camp (Red, Yellow, Green, and Blue).  On Monday mornings students are quizzed on their 6 sight words that they were working on during the previous week and are given a new set of 6 words to practice and focus on during the current week.  On Tuesdays and Thursdays we do some major focus groups with those four color sets and the students rotate between playing a sight word game with me, making one of our letter craft project,s working on our Lexia computer software, and doing an independent sight word activity.  We have been making progress with our sight words and this gives each group of students a chance to work on the words that are right for them at the time.  Each Monday your student will bring home their words they worked on for the previous week so that they can continue working on them at home, as well.  Wednesdays we do a whole group activity involving our sight words and on Fridays we review and tell our words to a partner.  I am loving this time to focus on sight words and getting the students more prepared to be consistent readers!  Check your child's folder for their sight words from this week on Monday!

                                                         

The School Science Fair is coming up and will be held on the same evening as Open House, May 24th.  Students can submit a project for the science fair, if they would like to.  This is NOT mandatory.  Families are encouraged to help their students with any projects.  Science projects can be: displays, experiments, models, and focus on any of the following areas: Earth Science, Physical Science, Space, Biology, or Chemistry.  If your child would like to do a project, now is the time to be thinking of what the project will be and how much time it will take to complete.  All participants will receive a ribbon for submitting a project.

Some great ideas can be found on these websites:

www.freesciencefairprojects.com

Take a quiz here with your child to see which project fits them best!

http://school.discoveryeducation.com/sciencefaircentral/

Guide for parents on helping students create Science Fair Projects with links to other resources.

HAVE A GREAT, SUNNY WEEKEND!

Also, if you are looking for a way to help out our classroom, I have a proposal up on donorschoose for some other seating options in our classroom.  Spread the word and share the link!

Help us out if you can and spread the word!

Fun and Festivities

During this first full week of December, we were able to start some pretty exciting projects in class.  One of our center rotations this week was creating a stuck Santa craft.  With the craft and part of another center rotation, the students wrote about what they would do if Santa got stuck.  The answers varied anywhere from "If Santa got stuck, I would help him pull him out with a lasso," to "If Santa got stuck, I would do nothing and leave him."  Some of the students got really creative with their responses. 

The kids worked really hard on these and they look great.  You might notice the handwriting in this picture.  One of our big focuses in class recently has been writing neatly and not letting our short lower case letters go above the mid-line.  The mid-line is the dashed line on each of the three lines shown below.  Many of the students have found this to be quite challenging because it requires them to write much smaller than they are used to.  Even though it is A LOT of work, it has certainly paid off and the students' handwriting has improved so much.  When we work on our handwriting like this, with our letters staying below the mid-line, not only are we working on their handwriting skills, but it also helps improve many of their other fine motor skills.  Please encourage your child when writing to try and keep their letters below the mid-line.  

We have also started some other fun holiday crafts.  We made some adorable looking winter trees, using triangle-shaped sponges.  Then the kids used their fingers to make ornaments and other decorations on their trees.  This was such a simple activity, but they turned out so nice and the class seemed to have a great time with both steps of this craft.

Our new P.E. unit for the month of December is Dance.  We love dancing so much as a class and this led itself perfectly into our English Language Arts story for this week.  One of our favorite dance videos is  below:

We listened to the story, "Jonathan and His Mommy" where they go on a walk and do all sorts of different walking movements.  As a class we tried some of them out and had a wonderful time!  We also listened to the story, "Move" and we discussed different types of movements that animals can do.  Later, we compared those animal movements and tried them out ourselves.  We tried leaping, sliding, slithering, waddling, running, and even flying.  We quickly determined that humans DEFINITELY CAN NOT fly, but we still had fun pretending.  

Also, with Language Arts this week we learned a new sight word: "a."  Now our list of sight words has grown to seven total: I, like, the, and, see, we, a.  Keep practicing those sight words.

Even with all of our work time, we did manage to find some fun play time, too.  This week the students had a chance to play with Legos, Wheels and Links, Megablocks, and Puzzles.

This afternoon, the school honored the students who had "Awesome Attendance" for the first trimester.  This meant that they did not have more than 2 absences and no more than 3 tardies or left early days.  There were a lot of students who were being honored.  These students were able to enjoy a root beer float with a parent!  Keep up the great work!

We have also been keeping up on our Lexia reading work on our software program.  Many of the students have made a lot of progress.  If your child comes home with a certificate from Lexia, it means that they have gained a level in their reading progress online.  

Upcoming Events - 

Saturday, December 16th - Breakfast with Santa event 9am - 12pm;  Thank you to all of the families that have donated to our "Game Night" basket for the silent auction at this event.  I think we have a really good basket with a lot of fun game opportunities for a family.  

Friday, December 22nd - Minimum day; students dismissed at 12:20pm

Just a reminder ---- the PTO Giving Tree is up in the office; If you would like another opportunity to donate and help out our school, take one of the stars from the tree and buy the item for that teacher.  This does not only have to be for your child's current teacher.  Thank you so much for all of your help and wonderful donations!