2016! I can’t believe it! As we transition back to school mode, we are reviewing letters and sight words this week. We have also been learning about the four seasons and the weather. I don’t think I’ve ever taught weather during a week that we actually had some interesting weather! Here are some videos to play at home to reinforce the letters (most important) and some fun songs about the seasons and the weather. Enjoy!
Please play this song and have your child sing along... especially during the sounds part at the end. Just a reminder, the letters we have done are: a, c, d, g, i, m n, p, r, s, and t. Your child should recognize the letter, be able to tell you the sound and tell you items that start with those letters :)
Here are two fun seasons songs:
We also learned about the weather and the kids LOVED this song:
Today we made weather wheels (like Kali’s above), which I hope you will continue to use once they go home on Friday. During class today, we looked at the weather forecast and did a fun interactive lesson on our Smart Board.
http://kidsweatherreport.com is a great kid-friendly weather website. We also looked at the 10 day forecast on the Weather Channel website as well as looked at the webcams at Mammoth Mountain! I explained how when it is raining here it is usually snowing in the mountains. That and I think I missed not going over winter break!
I
hope you all had a great winter break! I got to relax, sleep until 10 AM, and hold my best friend’s baby! I spent Christmas with my family here in Thousand Oaks and had a relaxing New Year’s Day watching football.
We are finally starting to get back
into the swing of things in Room 1! This is my favorite time of the year when the kids start to really soar with their reading and writing!
I wanted to say THANK YOU so much for all of the generous
gifts you gave me for the holidays! I enjoyed many of the sweets (probably gained a few pounds) and got to use
some of the gift cards over the break! I especially loved the class gift from all of
the families, a fun holiday basket full of special goodies put together by our
great Room Mom, Beth Kizito! In the basket was a gift card to the restaurant
Public School House 805 (because as Beth said, “Teachers need an education
too”), a gift card to the movies (to see Star Wars, of course!), some beautiful
Stella & Dot jewelry, an umbrella (for El Nino J) and even some
doggy treats for Trigger & Kimber!
Thank
you for being such a great group of supportive parents with wonderful children!
I am looking forward to the second half of the year (yahoo!).
Love,
Mrs.
Roll Oh, and I wanted to share our Christmas card with you all! We hope you all had a great holiday!
We’re finally back into the swing of things in Room 1 and I wanted to share pictures from our Gingerbread House Making Party we had before break!
Macy getting started.
Jason & his mommy.
Elf... I mean Auden with his parents.
Kali & her mommy.
It was so fun to have Ava’s daddy here!
Maddie & her mommy.
Camryn & her mommy. Look at that gingerbread house coming together!
Kaleigh making her house. It’s looking good!
Nice roof, Abigail!
Elf Emily & her mommy.
Wow, Cody! Cool house!
Julia & her mommy.
Elf Siena & her mommy.
Wow, Dean and his mom did a great job on their house!
Eddie & our wonderful room mom, Ms. Beth!
Dylan & his daddy.
Carson & his mom!
Avery designing away!
We love our friends!
So sweet to have Kate’s grandma!
Wow, Patrick! Cool house!
Waylon & his mommy!
Look how neat they came out!
Yummy! I could just eat it all up!
After the gingerbread party and recess, we got to addressing our letters to Santa! As far as I have heard, many of you got what you wrote in your letters!
Finishing up everything before TWO WEEKS off!
The WHOLE school singing Christmas & Hanukkah songs... Oh and Frozen & Star Wars too, because, well... who isn’t singing those songs?!
I’ve got to figure out how to post my own videos on to the blog! I took some cute ones of everyone singing.
Then... believe it or not but we got to end the day with our super fun dance class! The kids were dancing to the Nutcracker!
All parents are invited to join us for our gingerbread house making party on Friday, December 18th from 8:30-9:30 AM. Please be on the look out for an email coming from our room mom, Beth Kizito, regarding items needed and to RSVP on SignUpGenius! This is always such a fun event and I look forward to seeing many of you there!
PS The kids don’t know it yet but we are going to have a pajama day that day! Parents can wear theirs too! :)
I started doing this project a few years ago and it is one of my favorite projects to do at this time of the year! Whenever we do art, I always try to incorporate writing. We made the reindeer first and then during my small group I gave the kids this prompt:
Pretend that a reindeer is outside your house and out of curiosity, he looks in the window.... what would he see?
Here are our “Reindeer Peeks"
I love how different each reindeer turned out even with the same templates for the reindeer’s body. Each child made their own eyes and holly on the reindeer’s ears. When they wrote, they had to use this week’s sight word and to describe two things the reindeer saw. Also, as you will see, I didn’t tell them how to write the word reindeer :)
“My reindeer can see cookies and me sleeping."
“My reindeer can see my elf and my mama."
“My reindeer can see my toys and me tree."
“My reindeer can see my Christmas tree and he can see our house."
For the next few weeks, we will visit many different countries to learn about their holiday traditions. This week we boarded a “plane” and “flew” to Germany on Tuesday & Mexico on Friday.
All aboard the Holiday Express Airlines!
As the kids came in, they were given a ticket to board the plane.
We used this map to locate the United States, Germany & Mexico. Ask your child if they can find where we live and where we flew. Some of them were able to remember!
Ready for take off!
Before we took off to Germany & Mexico, we made sure our seat belts were tightly fastened, that our tickets were carefully stowed under our seat and that we were sitting up straight in our seats!
Checking to make sure the plane is ready to go!
And we’re off!
We started off on the “runway" (La Granada Drive) and I used Google Earth to fly from the street view option to the country we were visiting. I wasn’t able to hold the camera and zoom in, but we ended up landing on a dirt road next to the beach in Puerta Vallarta, Mexico! One of the kids said it looked just like Disneyland! :) I think it was the big buildings and palm trees!
Germany
Two of the holiday traditions that originated in Germany are gingerbread houses and decorating Christmas trees. The Germans create fancy gingerbread houses and we were able to see some in a history video on the Internet. We also learned about how the first people who brought evergreen trees into their house used to decorate them with fruit and candles. We learned how Thomas Edison created the very first strand of lights that was used for decorating the Christmas tree.
While visiting each country, the kids are keeping a suitcase full of all of their treasures from each country.
The kids color the country’s flag and a picture of the country from a map. We are also keeping a travel log which includes a sentence either about what we learned or made while in the country. Auden wrote that he made a Christmas tree in Germany. We also made gingerbread men.
Here’s a look at some of the fun activities we did earlier this week:
When the kids came in to class this week, I had set up a HUGE gingerbread house for all of their gingerbread men! The kids did a great job on their gingerbread man homework assignment.
We made these trees by using pre-cut strips by placing them in order from shortest to longest. This concept is often quite challenging spatially for Kindergarteners and is such a good exercise for them. They topped the project off with 20 white snowflakes. It’s fun to see where each child places the 20 dots. The kids were persistent through the process and the final product came out beautiful! This bulletin board looks like a beautiful winter forrest.
We aren’t actually done with the following activity, but the pictures of the process were too good not to share. During math, we have been decomposing teen numbers. Every day we count the days of school using straws. We currently have 6 bundles of 10 and 5 ones. Stumped? That’s 65 days of school. We have used straws and our Ten Frames to help us count. I introduced the following video of a new way to decompose teen numbers: by using base ten blocks that we called a “tower of 10” and the single cubes were “ones”.
We had practiced on Tuesday making teen numbers using unifix cubes. On Wednesday, we did a worksheet where the kids had to count the cubes and write the number. Finally, on Thursday, we were able to make our own teen number trees! The kids worked in groups to make 9 trees, one for each number 11-19. They cut out stars with the teen numbers on them and places them on top of the tree. They then grabbed a tens tower and some ones to show that number. I was really proud of the hard work the kids put in to the activity and how nicely they worked together in small groups!
Macy & Avery showing off their carefully organized trees waiting to be decorated with base ten blocks.
Waylon & Dean hard at work assembling their trees.
Kate & Abigail working away.
Siena, Camryn & Madylan making lots of trees.
Dylan, Carson & Jason
Emily & Julia counting out how many tens and ones they will need.
Mexico
On Friday morning we flew to Mexico to learn about their holiday traditions. We saw pictures of children taking part in a parade-like procession called Las Posadas, which takes place every night from December 16-24. We also learned about the legend of the poinsettia. We heard a story about a little girl who brought what many people thought was just weeds as a gift. To everyone’s surprise, the “weeds” turned into beautiful poinsettias! Ask you child what part of the poinsettia is actually the flower and which part is the leaf. It might surprise you!!
While in Mexico today, we made poinsettias, as Julia wrote in her travel log.
We painted these BEAUTIFUL poinsettias today using sponges and added construction paper leaves.
