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!

Gingerbread Week!

We spent an entire week immersed in the land of gingerbread!

             

We read a variety of gingerbread stories and compared the characters, chant, and ending of each.  The boys and girls became experts at making even more contrasts and comparisons as the week went along.  Here is a picture of the chart we made:

Students used a graphic organizer as they wrote a story making sure it included a beginning, middle, and end.  The story was in repsonse to the prompt:  "Where would you run to if you were the gingerbread boy/girl?"

We also took advantage of this yummy treat to do some graphing.  Students used a variety of graphs to display and interpret data after they took just one bite off of their cookie. Here is a picture of our "pie" graph:

Everyone enjoyed becoming "scientists" as students were presented with the question of "what do you think would have happened to the gingerbread boy if he would have swam across the river?"

Students had to write a "hypothesis" and design an experiment to prove it. During the experiment students drew pictures of their results, wrote directions for the experiment including materials needed and procedure, and wrote a conclusion including whether they proved their hypothesis and what they could infer from the results.  Use of adjectives and verbs was emphasized throughout the   writing.

It was a yummy good time!