Seuss Week is Coming! and why you should have your child 20 minutes a night.

Here is a little something I found on the internet that some of you might like to print out and place into your kiddos lunch boxes/backpacks.  I thought they were too cute!

 

Here is another really relevant piece of information for you.  This explains why you are always getting those "don't forget to read with your child" emails from me every week!

 

 

100th Day Fun

Sorry I am a little late posting these photos.  We had a great time celebrating our 100th Day of School.  I was looking back at picture from the beginning of the school year and I am amazed at how much they have grown!  Let me share some of the pictures of their projects with you and some of their writing.

 

 

I wanted to show you some of their illustrations and some of their writing from the 100th day unit.  They are so creative.  I really enjoyed reading their homework project and adding their drawings.

 

I don't think I am going to age well!  Me, being 100 years old.

This was their welcome to the 100th Day of School.

I love the homework they did with you at home.  At school we drew pictures of ourselves at 100 years old.  They all did a fantastic job of picturing themselves in the future.

I love the facial hair!

I think lots of the kids are planning on glasses when they are 100.

Many of the children really channeled their inner "grandma" and "grandpa" for their pictures.

Ok, this was the funniest one ever.  This little guy said he drew himself as an old French guy.  I have no idea how he came up with becoming French when he was 100!  I like the neckerchief too!

This girl is rocking the bun on top of the head!

I love the detail on his cane!  They are also starting to add settings to their pictures without being reminded to add detail.

These next pictures show what they would buy if they had 100 dollars.  These were too cute!

She wants to buy a talking monkey!

 

I hope you enjoyed this little peek into our 100th day!



 

Volcanoes and Dinosaurs have taken over F 16!

We are in a prehistoric state in our room.  We are learning so much about volcanoes and about dinosaurs.  These two subjects have taken over our reading, our writing, our math and even our letter of the week.  Let me show you some of the highlights from the first two weeks of February.

The children are learning about chemical reactions in this science lab.  They combine baking soda and vinegar (thank you parents for sending it in) and watch the chemical reaction that is created. 

We are doing this science lab because this looks like a volcano erupting.  The kids cannot get enough of this lab.

The children here are developing fine motor skills by using the eye dropper (which we got through the Donors Choose project you helped to fund).  They are also negotiating how to take turns, how to share resources and they are expanding their vocabulary and their speaking and listening skills by discussing what they are observing.

This is a neat dinosaur themed math game using geometric shapes to create patterns and pictures.

We watched several short videos about volcanoes from Discovery  and National Geographic Kids.  I also shared with them books and pictures I brought back from my trip to Hawaii.  I was lucky enough to go to the Volcano National Park.  I even have some lava rocks which you will see later in this post.  This is one child documenting what she learned from some of the books and videos we have been using for our research.

This child is studying a lava rock and documenting what she observes (sorry it is so blurry).

This child is very closely examining this lava rock from Hawaii.  They had lots of questions.  Seeing the rocks up close helped them to understand that lava is hot, melted rock, and when the lava cooled it formed these rocks.

This child is examining another lava rock.

This child referred to himself as a vulcanologist! 

These children are building a volcano in the block area.  We also talked about symmetry.

This child is using the dinosaurs to sort them and arrange them from largest to smallest.

We are having a ball with this unit of study.  I have brought in lots of books on these topics from the St. Charles County Library.  We have some very serious researchers in our room.  I love it when they find out something new about either a dinosaur or about a volcano.  They are devouring the books and dinosaurs and volcanoes are starting to show up in writing workshop in some of the books they are writing. 

Next, when we get more newspapers donated, we will start constructing our volcanoes.  We are all so excited!  Check back soon to see our latest.

Friendship Party

I wanted to share a few pictures of the Friendship party and some of there Valentine Boxes.  Thank you to the H's, the C's and the S's for putting together the party and being there to help.  We all had a great time.

Pin the Lips on Ms. Arrendale

I love the art work.  I look good!

Round and Round we go, where we stop, nobody knows!

Now I have lips in my eye.  This was a fun game!  We all laughed and laughed!

The was called "heart-a-stack".  The kids worked so hard on staking all of the hearts.  It was really hard!

 

New video's to support classroom concepts

I thought I would share what we are watching in class with you. 

These two videos support the rule of "when two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking".  We are starting to get into more complex rules during word work to help them read more difficult text and understand/decode the words.


They love these silly Numtums.  Whatever helps our visual learners "get" the numerical concepts we are working on works for me.  We also love these money songs!

One of our all time favorites is still  Alpha Blocks.  They are amazing and the kids really get into the episodes and remember so much about the letter sounds and blending.  This is one of their favorite episodes.

What we are watching on the Smart Board this winter

I know many of you use the learning videos at home to support your child's education.  Here is what we are watching this month!  Enjoy.

We use this counting by tens song by Have Fun Teaching.  We also use the counting by fives song and counting by twos song as well during math workshop.  You can find these on You Tube.

The children still love the Alphablocks and this is a wonderful tool to use to support letter sounds, blending sounds, learning about the ch, sh, th and wh sounds which can be very hard for young children to master.  Just type in Alphablocks into You Tube and let your child watch several of these short, engaging mini lessons which support their developing reading skills.  This is by far the children's favorite thing to watch as a brain break during reading workshop.

 

We used this You Tube video to learn about how baby penguins learn how to walk.  The children each got a turn standing on my feet like a baby penguin while I walked around with them.  This very short video is way too cute!

 

This is one of the video songs we use to practice our rhyming skills.  Beware, once you hear it it will be stuck in your head for the rest of the day!

 

Next week our letter is Ee.  Each week we watch the letter video from Have Fun Teaching to explore the sounds, shape, words and rules for each letter.  If you find your child is having difficulty with a few of their letter sounds let them watch the letter song for that letter.  The videos are short, the tunes are catchy and the kids become very focused on the video.

Our other favorite little video to support our letter of the week learning is from StoryBots on You Tube.  These videos are also a wonderful tool for vocabulary expansion.

I hope these video links will help you have fun with your child while you support their learning.  Thank you for exposing them at home.  The more exposure they have to these critical foundational skills the better they will become in all academic areas.  If you have any songs or videos that you are aware of to support reading, writing or science concepts please share them with me!

 

 

Our Second Grant and Winter Update

Our Second Grant from Donors Choose was funded and we received our items this week!

I cannot thank you enough for your support for our second Donors Choose grant this year.  We received three large boxes this week and we were so excited to open them!  We now how so many science, math and manipulative's to help us learn more about the world around us.  The clock has been the best in cutting down our transition times and we have gained so much more learning time each day.  We have Lincoln logs, Lego's, coin stamps, a cash register, play dough letter stampers, marble run, a fantastic microscope and a whole science kit for magnets and test tube experiments.  I am so excited to begin incorporate these new items into our learning activities. 

The children are using the Lego's for building, counting, sorting and graphing. 

The marble run is a fantastic tool for problem solving, fine motor skills and science concepts.

We are now using the cash register to help support our learning about money concepts.  The children are using the coins and cash register to play pet store, grocery store and pizza parlor!  They are also creating signs increasing their love of writing.

This is my favorite tool!  We use this for timing our clean up times, coming to carpet, rotating centers and tracking our stamina during reading and writing workshop!

These children are recreating the setting from many of the Laura Wilder books we have read throughout the school year.  They get out the books and use them as reference tools when building their old time homes and forts.

 

Penguin Measuring - a part of our Arctic Animals Unit

Our Art Teacher drew out these awesome penguins for us to use with our interactive bulletin board outside of our classroom.  The kids took the Unix cubes from our math center and used them to measure the different penguins.  This really helps them use their upper level math counting skills.  It is also helping them learn how to work together to solve a real life math problem.

This is the smallest penguin.  The children estimated how many Unix cubes it would take to measure each penguin and then had to see how close their estimation was to the actual number of cubes needed to measure the height.

This child is figuring out the difference between the height of each penguin, which is a more advanced math skills.

These children are working hard to create larger and larger measurements.

Our specials teachers are so amazing to support our classroom learning by lending their talents to help our learning in the classroom.  I could have never have made this learning bulletin board without Mrs. T's (our are teacher) help.  She drew out each of the five different types of penguins so I could paint them and create the bulletin board.  Thank you so much Mrs. T!  The children are so motivated to participate in our math activities using these great penguins.  We will start researching each of the penguin types and we will gather facts and post them on the bulletin board as the month progresses.

We read Snowmen at Night by Caralyn Buehner and illustrated by Mark Buehner.  The children love this book so we used it in our writing workshop as well.  I hope we get at least one big snow to support our winter unit.  There are so many wonderful ways to connect science, reading and writing to make the learning of words and sentences so much more meaningful to young children.  It is easier to write about something you have experience with, and I want them to experience making a snowman at school so they can add descriptive words to their writing.

 

This child wrote about what he thought his snowman would do at night when no one was watching.  He is showing a good understanding of basic writing skills such as putting spaces between words, capitalizing the first word and sounding out each syllable to write new words and express his thoughts.  We will work on putting punctuation in our writing next.

This child is starting to understand that letters make words and words create stories.  He could tell me exactly what his snowman did at night.  He turns into a Ninja Turtle!  How creative!  You can also start to make out some words in this writing such as "my", "at" and his name. 

This child is really working hard on independently sounding our complex words.  I can see she is ready for me to do a mini lesson with her on the "WH" sound (for the word wheels).  I really encourage the children to try to sound out their words and write them independently.  This way I can tell what lessons/skills they are ready for me to introduce.  I also see that she understands that certain words need to be capitalized but she is ready for a mini lesson for starting the sentence with a capital letter but leaving other words in lower case.  I am proud of her independence during writing workshop.  I can also tell by this writing sample that she understands that punctuation is needed at the end of the sentence.

This child is showing a good understanding of sentence structure.  Her first letter is capitalized, she has spaces between her words and she has punctuation at the end of her sentence.  I will encourage her during writing workshop to add additional sentences to tell a more detailed story.  So many of the children are really into writing workshop and they are so excited to realize that they are now independently being able to share their thoughts on paper.

Winter Science Experiment on How Some Animals Stay Warm During the Winter Months

We have been studying many Arctic Animals.  One of the children's favorites is the polar bear. I took this interest and found a neat science experiment to show them how the polar bear stays warm in the iceberg filled waters of the Arctic.  Here we have a bucket of ice water and a bag full of Crisco shortening.  We used these items to show the children how the blubber or fat keeps the polar bear insulated. 

These children tried to see how long they could hold their hands in the ice water without any protection.  BRRRRR, it was cold!

Next I had the children place their hand into a bag of the shortening.  They were then asked to place their hand back into the ice water.  Next they were encourage to talk about and describe their experience.

The children were amazed at how warm the fat kept their protected hand.  You could see the light bulbs going off for each child as they completed this science experiment.  The language, vocabulary and excitement as they explained the difference between being in ice water without the fat and being in the water with the fat was so exciting for me to witness!  We have so many budding scientists in our classroom. 

My hope is that you will view this post with your child and encourage them to tell you in detail what they remember about doing these projects.  The more they can reach back into their memories and recall the information the better chance they will have for these experiences to stay in their long term memory.  This will help them become more descriptive writers, this will help them make more meaningful connection when reading new books on similar topics, and will help them become better at verbally retelling their experiences and become a more confident and descriptive public speaker.  I hope you enjoyed this post.  More to come very soon!