We had a great first day of winter.  We celebrated by making snowflakes!  We read The First Day of Winter, by Denise Fleming.  This is a beautiful book with the illustrations made from paper pulp.  This book is like the 12 Days of Christmas, except there are only ten days of winter in this book.  We exercised our brain and practiced remembering what each day brought.  We broke this into two parts and did the first five days, and then the last five days.  Practicing our short term memory is important in learning and we know with practice, we can get better at remembering.
We exercised our little fingers and strung beads to make a snowflake necklace.  Then we had stations and attempted a crayon relief painting of snowflakes, decorated a foam snowflake with diamonds, and cut snowflakes out of coffee filters.  We loved making snowflakes and did an incredible job cleaning up!
We also learned about Snowflake Bentley and looked at his big camera and first photographs of snowflakes.  We also watched The Waltz of the Snowflakes from The Nutcracker Suite.  
We enjoyed lots of snowy music and had fun working with our friends!  

Have a nice evening!
​Miss Wolfe

We loved the crazy hair and crazy hats today!  What a fun way to start off the week!
We practiced writing the letter Bb today.  We read a really great story called Bee-Bim Bop, by Linda Sue Park.  This is such a fun book with rhyming and a great rhythm to the words.  Ask me to tell you what bee-bim and bop mean in Korean!
In math, we made solid shapes out of toothpicks and marshmallows.  The hardest part was not eating the marshmallows!  We made two kinds of pyramids, a cube and a triangular prism.  
In science, we read the book The Wind Blew by Pat Hutchins.  We talked about vocabulary that can be used to tell how strong the wind is blowing.  Ask me to tell you about the pictures below and some of the words that can be used to describe the wind.  Be ready for every other word to be blustery... 

Have a nice evening!
​Miss Wolfe

Today we started our day looking at these beautiful photographs.  We discussed mountains, valleys and hills.  We talked about what the differences are between a hill and a mountain.  
We visited Colorado today, and read an interesting book called Maria's Mysterious Mission, by Claudia Cangilla McAdam.  This story is about a llama who has come from South America and is now a pack animal for hikers in the Rocky Mountains.  Ask me to tell you my favorite part, probably my least favorite, in the story.
In science, we talked about meteorologists and how they predict the weather.  Ask me to tell you what predict means. We identified weather symbols and are using them to collect data about the weather each day.  We are looking at the sky, wind, precipitation and temperature and using a symbol on our charts to tell what the weather was like after lunch.
We began talking about solid shapes in math.  We introduced some vocabulary and looked at photographs of different things to identify their solid shape.  In our Eureka curriculum we talk about cylinders, cubes, cones and spheres, but we also talked about rectangular and triangular prisms.  
Today I introduced the SeeSaw site to the children.  This is a site where I can put books, lists of words, assignments, games and so many other things.  This site is teacher and kid friendly by making it easy to add our voice so the children can listen to the directions or so I can hear them read some of their writing, word lists, or books I put on as an assignment.  Since we had indoor recess, we skipped play time and had extra computer time.  

Have a nice evening!
​Miss Wolfe

We had a great discussion about these sea stacks.  The children talked to their partners, speculating that they were formed by water dripping into cracks, or that they somehow came up from under the water.  Of course, Billy Blue Hair gave a great explanation, involving food of course, that helped us understand better how these unusual landforms were created.  Ask me to tell you about how these sea stacks are formed.

Today the children drew and/or wrote the beginning middle and end of The Grumpy Goat story we have been  working with this week.  We made a line that showed how the goat's feelings changed throughout the story.  We made the line go up as he felt happier and down during the sad parts of the story, and down to the very bottom when he was angry and grumpy.  I'll send home the papers next week after I go through all of them.
Today we worked with tracing shapes, as well as drawing shapes with a ruler to get proper corners or vertices.  I was looking through some math papers and noticed that many of the children had rounded corners, and we want to make sure that for accuracy in describing the shapes, we make some better angles, not curves.  
​We wrote nonsense words today using the letters we have introduced in Really Great Reading.  I said the word several times, encouraged the children to tap it out, then we checked it together and rewrote it as a word on the line next to the letters we wrote.  I'll send these home next week as well as I didn't have time to look through all of them closely.  From what I could see, they did a great job, although I need to remind them that when we do this kind of practice we use only lower case letters.  

We enjoyed a fun read aloud called The Great Fuzz Frenzy by Janet Stevens and Susan Stevens Crummel.  This is a fun story about prairie dogs who get an unexpected tennis ball down their tunnel.  Ask me to tell you the beginning, middle and end of this story.

Have a great weekend!
​Miss Wolfe

We read a beautiful story yesterday and today called Grumpy Goat, by Brett Helquist, about a friendless, grumpy goat who goes to live in Sunny Acres, the friendliest farm in the county.  Ask me to tell you the story elements:  characters, setting and the beginning, middle and end.  This story shows who a character can change throughout the story.  This goat changes from a grumpy goat to a happy goat at the end of the story, but goes through grief when something special to him goes away.  Ask me to tell you what the characters did to help goat while he was grieving.  This class often claps after stories they love.  They LOVED this story, until we read Friendshape today which they then declared to be their favorite book ever. 
We continue to learn about landforms.​  This morning for our Picture Talk, we looked at this photograph.  Ask me to tell you what I noticed.

Yesterday we took a virtual field trip to look at some amazing landforms.  We'd like to tell you about them as you go along on a beautiful, short journey that may have you calling your travel agent when you finish watching it!  Be sure to look for hoodoos, arches, canyons, slot canyons, buttes and mountains.  

Today we went on another field trip, but this time to Alaska.  We saw more beautiful mountains, valleys and glaciers.  Ask me to tell you why we are grateful for plate tectonics!  That's a difficult topic, and not really in our curriculum, but you can't just look at beautiful mountains and not wonder how they formed.  Luckily, we have Billy Blue Hair to explain it for us.  

In math, we continued to talk about plane or flat shapes.  We are focusing on the vocabulary as well as drawing the shapes. 

Have a nice evening!
​Miss Wolfe