A Special Visitor

We had a special visitor today who told us all about his pets and home, showed us his photo album, and read us a story.  It was a very special morning!  Many more photos are posted above in a slideshow!

PJ Day

Don't forget that our special Polar Express activity and PAJAMA day is tomorrow! I can't wait!

PJ Day

Don't forget that our special Polar Express activity and PAJAMA day is tomorrow! I can't wait!

Winter holidays

We have been learning about different winter holidays this week and have made many projects. We learned about Hannukah and made a menorah and played the dreidel game. We talked about Kwanzaa and wove mkeka mats. This was very tricky, but our class stuck with it and had lots of fun. We talked about Ramadan and learned about the phases of the moon. This was very interesting! Take a look at the moon each night and have your child they and remember words like waxing, waning, new moon, full moon, crescent, quarter, and gibbous. There are also some neat videos on YouTube to watch!
We made Christmas trees by ordering branches by length and then decorated them! We will be making poinsettias and rangoli designs next week!

Gingerbread math centers

During our gingerbread unit the kids visited several gingerbread math centers. They measured their height and the length of their jump with gingerbread, made graphs, made gingerbread glyphs, and measured a gingerbread's perimeter and area using candies and math cubes.  They also decorated a gingerbread by rolling two dice, adding the numbers, and adding the correct decoration for the number.  They loved these centers! There are some pictures below!

Assertion Assembly

On Friday, we attended an assembly on assertion  with our buddies.  We learned what assertion is and some ways to be assertive (stand tall, shoulders back, look the person in the eye, use a firm but respectful voice).  The high school acting group performed a couple of short skits showing what assertion looks like and the staff surprised the kids with this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2NWkndNtF8

We had a ton of fun and the kids seemed to love it too!!!

Finished Houses

Here are some pictures of the finished houses. This week we also did some math and writing with our houses. We counted and graphed the types of candies, chose the candy with the most and fewest, and added different candies together. We also wrote sentences describing our gingerbread houses. Our second grade buddies helped us with some of the math and writing on Friday!

Gingerbread Houses

We made gingerbread houses this week and painted them with shaving cream "snow." Our class thought this was amazing!! They loved finishing off their pictures with this new type of paint!

Visualizing

For the last two weeks we have been focusing on visualizing during reader's workshop. We learned that visualizing is when you make a picture in your brain based on the words the author writes.  I read the story The Napping House without showing the illustrations and this is one example of what our class visualized!