Happy Holidays!

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December Excitement

Merry Christmas everyone!  Our classroom was full of all kinds of exciting activities the past couple of weeks.  There definitely was a holiday feel to our room.  The following are a few of the many fun things we did while learning!

In reading, we enjoyed many different versions of the "Gingerbread Man" folktale and made comparisons between them. This information was recorded on a chart.  The kiddos really enjoyed discussing the similarities and differences between the stories.

As an important part of the new Common Core State Standards, the students are to learn how to do persuasive writing.  We practiced this several times over the past few days through various reading response activities.  After reading a book titled "Who Will Guide My Sleigh Tonight?" the the students chose their own animal to guide their sleigh if they were Santa Claus.  They had to give reasons for "why" the animal would be a good choice. This was difficult as many just wanted to put "because it is my favorite animal" or "because it is cute."  After much discussion and after hearing many examples, they finally began to get the idea.

                                             

We also read a book titled "The Littlest Elf" and learned the important parts of a job application.  The boys and girls had to give reasons for why they would be qualified for the elf position of taking care of the reindeer.

We practiced writing a story summary and learned about homophone pairs after reading "Olive the Other Reindeer."  

We used a "somebody, wanted, but, so, finally" graphic organizer to write a summary of the story.

Next, we sorted and matched word pairs.  Then, the kiddos had to find pairs of homophones that had been scattered around the room.  Finally, each student had to pick one pair of homophones and write a sentence using those words.  They also drew an illustration for their sentence.

In math, we practiced fact families with an elf sort activity.

We also practiced gathering, organizing, and drawing conclusions from data as we found out who thought a ride on Santa's sleigh would be either fun or scary.  The boys and girls interviewed each other to gather their data, then recorded it in several different ways.

We also did some graphing following a gingerbread cookie activity in which everyone had to record the way they ate their cookie.  We discovered that most of the class ate the arms and legs off first!

Then, we used this data to create a large pie graph on a gingerbread man.

We also played many different Christmas themed math games including "Cover Up" and "Bump" while practicing adding and subtracting. 

To add some science to the fun, we did an experiment to find out what would happen to the Gingerbread Man if he had to swim across the river rather than catch a ride on the fox as he did in the stories we read.  We discussed what we would need to do the experiment and made a list.  Then, we proceeded to put the Gingerbread Man (cookie) in the water and recorded how it looked at various time intervals.  

We also took some time to create beautiful Christmas cards for the parents, as well as, a "stained glass" ornament and reversible Santa-Christmas tree.  They turned out very pretty!

And of course we had a great time the last day of school before Christmas break with treats provided by our room parents.  The kiddos even got to make a cute sticker decorated ornament. 

 We were even surprised by a visit from Santa!  He came to our classroom and then, later we gathered in the gym for some Christmas songs.  Santa also read "Twas the Night Before Christmas" to the boys and girls.  The students were so excited to get to see Santa at our school!

We hope you all have a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year!  See you in 2014!

Reindeer and Santa

Hello!  December is marching right along and Christmas break is in sight.  It's looking very festive outside our room as we display all of the great writing and cute things we've made.

Last week we wrote our letters to Santa and read all kinds of fun stories about him.  One of our favorites was titled "Santa's Stuck!" by Rhonda Greene.  This is a story about Santa eating too many cookies as he makes his rounds on Christmas Eve.  He gets too fat and can't get back up the chimney.  The story goes on with all sorts of animals trying to help him.  As a follow-up writing activity, the kiddos wrote their ideas for how they would get Santa out of his predicament.  We have been focusing on using transition words as a way to organize our writing, so, for this assignment, everyone used the words first, next, then, and finally and practiced using commas.  (Check out our pocket chart full of words we need when writing in narrative or explanatory style.)  Of course we just had to have a cute "craftivity" to go along with our writing.

 

For more practice with these transition words, we wrote the sequence of events Santa goes through to get all of those presents delivered on Christmas Eve all around the world.  Our mentor text for this activity was a book titled "Hurry, Santa!" by Julie Sykes.   It is chocked full of wonderful adjectives and verbs, so, we gathered these up as we read each page of the story.  The kiddos were expected to use some of these more exciting words in their writing and did a super job!

Well, we couldn't read about Santa without spending time reading and learning all about reindeer (the real kind).  Before reading many non-fiction books about reindeer, we wrote down what we knew about them.  After reading, we gathered facts from our reading, and discussed whether some of our earlier thinking was a fact or an opinion.  This is a difficult concept for first graders, but they did a great job with it!   Each student wrote down their favorite reindeer facts and created a very cute reindeer.

Don't worry! Santa's reindeer were not forgotten as we alphabetized  the names of his reindeer!

We also read a wonderful book titled "The Night Tree" by Eve Bunting and made comparisons of a character in the story to someone in our own life.  We also made many inferences along the way as we looked carefully for clues in the pictures and author's words.  We discussed how the author's words and the illustrator's pictures work together to evoke a certain mood or feeling.  The boys and girls are loving this type of close reading of the text.  We do a lot of "turn and talk" with their "elbow buddy" as we learn and discuss what great writing sounds and feels like. As a follow-up activity everyone wrote about their connection to a story character and illustrated it with pictures.

So. . .if your child comes home exhausted, you can see why!!  We are very, very busy all day long, every day!  This week it's everything "gingerbread" so be sure to check back for an update!