Moon

This wee in ELA we are focusing on procedural text. To wrap up our activities with the moon we made a moon. I simply frosted some sugar cookies, and the students added some delicious chocolate chips to create the craters. 

Thinking Maps

We love using thinking maps in class. Here are a few we completed this week alone. The kids love getting together and completing them as a class. 

circle map

Venn Diagram 

Flow Map

This is our thinking map about the months and seasons. I found this great book from scholastic and used it as the balance to our lesson. 

Mayor Ron Jensen

In honor of DEAR week we had a very special guest reader. Our special guest was Mayor Ron Jensen. He read a very funny book, "How to Babysit a Grandpa."  The kids were all so excited and loved him. Thank you Mayor Jensen for coming to our class. 

Numbers 11-20

In math we are focusing on our numbers 0-20. To help support, and build our number recognizition we practiced writing our numbers. After we wrote each number we added to our base 10 block. We first started building a 10 base ten block. After we practiced writing each number added to our new base 10. The kids really had a lot of fun with this, and began to get a strong visual of how the numbers looked with a base 10. 

Joining Numbers

In math we are focusing on joining and separating numbers up to 10. To celebrate for the holidays we used Santa as our manipulative. Each child had a turn to be a Santa number. Using the two giant 5-frames helped them understand how to join the numbers. I got the idea to use the huge 5 frames from Chalk Talk, a fabulous blog. I can see how it truly works with the students and understand. They also get excited to act out the math problem. 

Gingerbread Man and Girl

Today we read the books the Gingebread Girl and the Gingerbread Boy. After we read the books we made a Venn diagram comparing the two different stories. We wrote about which character we would rather be after we made our comparisons. For math time we are focusing on the numbers 11-15. We used 5 frames to create the numbers and displeased how many gingerbread santas could fit on the 5 frames. 

Jingle our Elf

Since Christmas is quickly approaching we are celebrating in school a different way each day. Today we celebrated by reading about elves, Santas helpers. We read the book elf on a shelf. We actually have a little elf in our own classroom, and named him the adorable name of Jingle. To celebrate the elves we made elf hats (which were super easy). After we brainstormed about the different types of jobs elves have and wrote about their jobs. We just LOVE our elf, Jingle, and are getting excited about Christmas.