Week 18

This week, we read the book Snowman at Night. We focused on many activities with this book.

We practiced our writing skills while visualizing the snowmen skating on the ice before we saw the illustration in the book. We also worked on retelling by remembering what details were in the story.

We practiced making connections to the story by writing what the story reminded us of and how we can relate to the story.

We wrote opinion pieces too and told whether we liked hot chocolate or chocolate milk the best.

This is the last week for letter reviewing. We will move on to other sounds next week. Here are the letters we reviewed.

We learned the "old" word family and practiced making many words with "old" in them.

Our sight words this week were "what" and "you".

In math, we made snowmen. 

We graphed our snowmen by what kind of hat they were wearing.

We began learning about 3D shapes in math. We learned the words "edges", "vertices" and "faces". We looked for things in our environment with these shapes. We also made a snowman 3D shape book.

We watched a video to help us learn the 3D shapes.

You may view the video on Youtube by following this link below:

3D Shape Song

Friday was a big hit with our very first tile time. Thank you to all of the parents that made this possible. We are already looking forward to our next tile time.

In science, we are studying about polar animals. Our close read book this week was a book about penguins.

Here are the vocabulary words from the story.

We read many penguin books too. We wrote facts that we learned about them.

We learned that the male penguin carries the egg on his feet for several months keeping it warm until it hatches. We practiced carrying a pretend egg on our feet and realized how hard it was.

We learned why penguins are black and white. The black color helps camouflage them from predators above the water and white color on their belly helps to camouflage them from predators in the ocean. We enjoyed playing with the penguin puppet.

We had fun making a penguin craft and they are displayed in the hallway.

In science, we did another experiment to follow the scientific method. We predicted which liquid would dissolve a marshmallow the best after two days. Pictured below is the start and end of the first day.

After two days, this is what our experiment looked like.

The Coke dissolved the marshmallow partially the quickest, but after the third day, the vinegar had completely dissolved the marshmallow. We wrote conclusions in our science journals.

In social studies, we learned about Martin Luther King, Jr. and read these books about him. We are looking forward to having Monday off to celebrate his birthday.

We had 3 days of indoor recess this week due to cold weather. We enjoyed doing Cosmic Kids Yoga.

Our 100th day of school is quickly approaching on February 4th. Thank you for all that signed up to help with our 100th day snack. I need one more person to bring a box of Twinkies and we have everything covered. You may begin bringing in the items at any time. I need all items by February 3rd please. 

We will be exchanging Valentines too. Please feel free to purchase or make cards for EVERY student in the class. You can find a list of students in our class on the homepage of the blog. You might want to have your students make and address a few cards each night so that it is not overwhelming to do them all at once. We will open our cards at the end of our Valentine party on February 13th. This is a day where the students are allowed to bring "food of minimal nutritional value" to share, so if you would like to bring any candy for your children to exchange with their card, it is ok on this day.

Parent conferences will be on Monday, February 16th. The students do not have school on this day due to President's Day. We will be doing a show and tell in the morning. The students will have approximately 30 minutes to show you around the classroom and things that they do on a daily basis. This is completely optional. I know that many may want an extra long holiday weekend and may go out of town, and if you are reading this, you probably have a pretty good feel of what we are doing in the classroom. If you would like to attend a show and tell, I will post a sign up on Volunteer Spot in the near future.