Dr. Seuss week

To celebrate Dr. Seuss we learned a lot about him from Pebble Go, and read many if his books. 

We created a circle map of Dr. Seuss and did a directed drawing of him in his later years. 

We made a brace map of the cat in the hat. The kids then wrote about why he is so unique. 

We read Green Eggs and Ham. We made an egg glyph, and created a multiflow map. 

We compared two books, The Cat in the Hat, and the Cat in the Hat Comes Back. We also made the cat in the hat. The hat is the color of each students favorite color.  

Finally we made a timeline of his book. Since he wrote SO many we only included the ones we read. 

It was a wonder week full of fun, and learning. 

The Biggest Valentine Ever

This week and a very exciting week. We celebrated our 100th day of school, and it is Valentines day this Friday. To honor Valentines day I found another one of Steve Kroll's great books, The Biggest Valentine Ever. We discussed the sequence of the book, and then studied the two main characters. This was completed in a Venn Diagram. At the end of the book the two characters make a huge Valentine and it looked like a mouse. We made a similar craft. 

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.