I got a very nice note from Mrs. Consroe about how well the students did while I was away.  She is a wonderful teacher, and I knew they would be in good hands with her!  I'm so proud of the way the children welcomed her and responded to her kind, gentle manner!
Today we talked about how a character's feelings can change throughout a story.  We reviewed the story Knufflebunny, by Mo Willems.  We identified and labeled Trixie's feelings in the beginning of the story, middle of the story, and at the end of the story.  Then we read a new story called Jabari Jumps, by Gaia Cornwall, that tells the story of a little boy who is eager to jump off the diving board now that he knows how to swim.  However, he's not as confident when he gets to the pool with his father and little sister.  We thought of words that identified Jabari's feelings.  Ask me to tell you how Jabari felt at the beginning, middle and end of the story.  
Today we talked about germs and how they spread.  We read a story called A Germ's Journey, by Thom Rooke.  In this story, we saw how germs are spread and what we can do so germs aren't spread.  We watched this silly video about how to sneeze and cough into your sleeve.  I hope you enjoy it!

If you have not done so already, please help your child find and bring back their Read to Me, Talk to Me book.  We have rotated our class baskets and want to have all the books for the next class to borrow!  Thanks!

Have a nice evening!
Miss Wolfe

Today we read a great book by Julia Cook called Decibella and Her Six Inch Voice.  This book is about a little girl named Isabella who is always loud!  Her teacher helped her learn to monitor her voice and use different voice volume for different situations.  Ask me to tell you about the voice levels and the silly word they used to practice the levels.   

In math, we played Whose Got More, which is basically a War game.  We used cards with numbers, pictures, or dots to play the game.  We learned to pass out the cards equally and how to hold the cards in our little five and six year old hands.  This was the bigger challenge!  Here are a few pictures of these little card sharks playing Whose Got More.

Have a nice evening!
​Miss Wolfe

Today we learned about veterans and what Veterans Day is about.  We talked about the different branches of the military and we looked at different war memorials in D.C.  Most of the children did not know of any veterans, so you may want to tell them about someone in your family or a friend that you know who served or is on active duty now.  We watched a short video that explained more about Veterans Day.  Ask me to tell you what I learned about Veterans Day.

In reading, we are talking about beginning, middle and end of stories.  The beginning of the story is where the story gets started.  The middle of the story is typically the biggest part of the story where most of the action occurs.  The end of the story is how it all worked out.  We revisited an old favorite, Sally's Purple Socks, to identify events that happened in each part of the story.
We are practicing asking questions to find out more.  We played What's in the Bag and asked who, what, where, when, why, how questions to determine what was in the bag.  We will continue to play this game to get better at asking questions and being strategic in narrowing down the focus of our questions and guesses.
In math, we played Where's Teddy.  This is a deductive reasoning game that helps students narrow down their guesses with clues as to whether the bear is hiding under a cup whose number is more or less than the number they guessed.  Knowing whether the number is more or less puts some cups out of play, so we turned them over so the kids got a good visual of what number it could still be.

We collected data today to find out which Disney movie the students in our class liked the most.  I found the data fascinating!  I should share this data with Disney because it doesn't look good for the princesses.  I'll point out I was the lone vote for Beauty and the Beast, however I sang a song from the Lion King and it got the most votes.  Interesting.

We started our day studying a photograph of a flock of flamingos.  After we talked about what we noticed and wondered, we reflected on our year so far.  We talked about how one quarter of our year is done already, and how proud I am of the way they are coming together as a group to support and help each other.  They have made new friends and gotten to know other friends better.  As a group, we are learning to work together, work out problems, and learn from each other.  We watched this clip below to see how these flamingos really dance together!​

We worked on the mechanics of writing today with the whiteboards.  We talked about what writers do that makes it easier for others to read their writing.  We practiced starting our sentences with capital letters and using lower case letters for the remaining words.  We also worked with making sure our sentence ended with punctuation.  We know putting spaces between words is very important so the reader knows where our words begin and end.  ​These skills will develop over time as we write more, so when you are noticing what your child is doing in writing, it's best not to overwhelm them with fixing everything at once.  Choosing one thing, such as using lower case letters or adding punctuation to something they wrote would be enough to do.  We are building these young writers' confidence so it's important that we build on what they know and are doing, but challenge them to do a little more.  

Have a nice evening!
​Miss Wolfe

We had an amazing fashion show.  The children were very prepared and worked well with a partner to come up with a description for what their partner was wearing on the runway.  

Today we looked at this comic to being a few lessons using talking bubbles in our writing.  We studied each frame which was really a good lesson in checking for understanding as we read.  We noticed the talking bubbles and thought about an author we all love who uses a lot of talking bubbles.  Ask me to tell you which author uses all talking bubbles in his Elephant and Piggie books!
We talked about how we can look at other authors work to use as a mentor, another teacher, to help us in our writing.  Many of the students have read the Piggie and Elephant books, over and over again, so we looked at an author that Mo Willems was a mentor to and used this book to begin our study.  
We read We Are GROWING, by Laurie Keller.  This book is about eight blades of grass who are talking about what is special about each of them.  One blade of grass is not able to think of what it is that makes him special.   In the setting we see a mower approaching and hear it's sound. Ask me to tell you what happens, and what the last blade of grass finds out is special about him. Although we were noticing that this story is told all through talking bubbles, we also noticed how authors make some letters stand out either by size, their color, boldness or all capitals.  
We also studied the seasons today.  We watched short videos from BrainPopJr. that talked about how people, animals and plants, and our weather changes in each of the seasons.  Then we talked about how people dress for each season and kind of weather.  We practiced talking about clothing for different weather with some bear paperdolls on our board in preparation for our fashion show.


We are really excited about our Weather Fashion Show tomorrow!  I'll post lots of pictures!

Have a nice evening!
​Miss Wolfe  

Candy was definitely on our minds, so we started our day with this photograph.

We started our morning studying this photograph.  It's not surprising the first thing the students wanted to talk about was the different kinds of candy.  We talked about how we could count all the jars of candy.  The first idea was music to my ears!  A child suggested counting by twos, then another by fives.  When we looked at the shelves, we saw how two of the shelves looked like a ten frame, so we circled the ten frames and quickly counted.  The students didn't notice, but some of the shelves had another jar hiding behind the poles but we mostly saw the five jars, so if you happen to visit this store, there may be more than 80 jars of candy in the window!

Have a nice evening!
Miss Wolfe