Winter Holiday Party

Mrs. Daniels, you are fantastic!  Thank you for all your hard work and great party. I feel so fortunate this year to have such wonderful parents and great students!

Although the food was wonderful, the gift exchange was great, the craft was, well crafty, the highlight of the party was none other than the "jingle booty" game Mrs. Daniels found from the game show "Minute to Win It".  We had a blast and I can't believe I was so competitive with a 6 year old.

 Abigail and Allie prepare for the showdown! Abigail shakes as many of the jingle bells out of her box as she can while Jarron watches on.

What a wonderful group of kids I have this year. I feel truly blessed!

Where, oh where, is the Gingerbread Man?

 This is an absolute fantastic activity that we did this year with the help of Ms. Doennig's class.  Our class had a giant gingerbread man that came to visit us in the morning with the promise of a tasty treat right after lunch, but when we returned to class he had disappeared!!  We were quite excited!  Several of the kids thought he had left a trail, just like the  book "Hansel and Gretel" we had read, not realizing that the raisins we found on the ground were there own from snack earlier in the day.

We made LOST posters and hung them in the hallways just in case someone were to find our gingerbread man and would want to return it.

Come to find out, the gingerbread man was up to his old tricks and had ran away.  He left us clues in the hall for us to follow him.  We decided that we would each make a map of the school to help us navigate the clues.  Tyler from our class was in charge of reading the  clues to us.

We navigated the halls following the clues.  We finally "caught" the sneaky gingerbread man in the office hiding under the tree.  Ethan did a good job sneaking around and giving the signal that he had found him!

I held tightly on to the gingerbread man and took him back to Ms. Doennig's room so that we could enjoy him.  We decided that Tyler deserved to eat the mouth because he was our flawless reader!

 

Run, run as fast as you can!

Wow! It has been another crazy week! We started the week preparing for our amazing music program.  Mrs. Smith does a fantastic job and the kids were spectacular! I know how hard it is as an adult to "perform" in from of a crowd-I can't imagine what is running through a five year old's mind having to sit in front of a gymnasium packed full of people.  GREAT JOB CLASS!

But.....on to the good stuff! The students really enjoyed this unit on the Gingerbread man because they get to hear a familiar story with repetitive phrases. Boy, do they love to chime in!  I like the Gingerbread unit for so many reasons. It is one of those sneaky units that teaches, but it is so fun, the kids don't realize it is work. Now that's my kind of school!  Because we read a series of books, The Gingerbread Man, The Gingerbread Girl, and The Gingerbread Cowboy we achieve text-to-text connections(book to book) connections all over the place!
We started the week by reading two books with the same title, The Gingerbread Man, and making a Venn Diagram to compare and contrast  the books.

We also learned some new fancy words this week, character, setting, and events.
This went hand in hand with our other two books we read for this unit The Gingerbread Girl and The Gingerbread Cowboy.

 We built a gingerbread house to chart how the books were alike and different.  It is so fascinating to watch the light bulbs go on!  In the book The Gingerbread Girl the main character learns from her brother's mistakes by avoiding getting eaten by the fox by taking her licorice whip hair and lassoing the foxes mouth. The Gingerbread Cowboy, however does not escape the tricky coyote. I like to stop reading this book right before the end and have the class make predictions on what they think will happen.  A lot of the students thought the Gingerbread Cowboy would lasso the coyote just as the Gingerbread Girl had done, however we were surprised to learn that the the Gingerbread Cowboy was no different than the Gingerbread Man!

We also are able to easily reach a text-to-self connection(book to self) when we
read Maisy Makes Gingerbread.  Maisy gets to lick the bowl in the book when she is done and the majority of the students(plus one teacher who likes to eat!) have experienced this.

Ms. Doennig and I thought it would be fun to "live" in a gingerbread house for a few weeks.

Our class spent the afternoon after our Thanksgiving feast making candy for the house and gingerbread people for our bulletin board.

Our writing project for the week was incorporating a lot of popcorn words and a little imagination!  We wrote about where we would run if we were the Gingerbread Man or Girl.

I can run to the owl.

Finally, we ended the week decorating gingerbread cookies and graphing where we bit our cookie first.  This was a project we did with Mrs. Clouse's class.

H....is for Hibernation

Our letter study will soon be coming to a close. It is hard to believe our school year is close to half way over! This week's focus letters were Jj and Hh. With the weather turning colder  it has been a perfect time to talk about bears and hibernation!
We began our unit on Monday by activating our prior knowledge:
What do we already know about bears?  

As always, I was surprised by the amount of correct information the students already knew. I think my favorite is the first one-"They take picnic baskets".
On Tuesday, I introduced the concept of "Fantasy" and "Reality".  We began the day by doing a simple exercise of determining if the pictures were real(reality) or not real(fantasy) and just getting them used to the new terminology.  When I introduce a new "big" word we refer to that as "the FANCY way to say it" and we all hold our pinkies in the air.  So, our new FANCY word for the week was fantasy.
We then read a non-fiction book on bears and compared that to our background knowledge.
On Wednesday, we continued our bear study by categorizing what we had learned into three categories:
Bears can, Bears are, and Bears have

We then read a  fantasy book titled Bear Feels Sick and did a comprehension exercise that I loved!

  We took a piece of plain, white paper and made a trifold. This gave us beginning, middle, and end columns to retell the story.  We brainstormed as a group different ideas we remembered from the book.

Thursday was the day I couldn't wait for--Hibernation Day!! I am not sure if it was because we had something to look forward to or the simple fact I could wear my jammies!  We wrote in our journals about a time when we were sick.  I am constantly amazed at how well these kids do!

                                                               "I was sick on a school day."

                                                                "I was sick at preschool."

                                                          "I was sick when I was five."
                              I thought this was adorable as this student traced their hand and five finger.
Finally, we ate a large snack and settled in for a long afternoon nap....not really! We crawled into our caves (and by caves I mean under our tables) with our blankets, books, and fellow bears.