Having a "bear"-y good time...

We continued our unit on winter animals and learned about bears and their habits in the winter!  We read more informational text and searched the internet for answers to our questions.  We had fun watching the polar bears and panda bears on different zoo cameras too!  They worked hard on their bear books and wrote facts about the three bears we researched: grizzly bears, polar bears, and panda bears.

Matthew's writing about grizzly bears!

We wrote about our favorite bear at the end of the week.
Julian likes the pandas because they have black eyes "fur".

We also had our first "directed drawing" lesson! The students followed my directions to draw a grizzly bear, step-by-step.  They used crayons and Twistable crayons to color them!

Davis' grizzly bear

We used oil pastels to draw the background and cotton balls to paint these pandas!

Charlie's panda bear

We learned about the greater than and less than symbols with bears too! We learned the "bear" always wants to eat the number that is bigger/greater than than the other.  Here we are practicing as a group!

6 > 3

This week's letter was the letter Bb!  We sorted words beginning with b and ending with b. Then we read the words and drew pictures to go with them.  

Sorting and spelling words

Thank you so much for all of your donations and hard work for our APEX Fun Run!  Our class loved the ice cream party! 

Researching penguins...

We began the week learning about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  We read the story, The Crayon Box That Talked and made ourselves into a crayon.  We learned how our differences make us unique and special individuals.

We are all different and special!

We are learning what "research" is! We had fun exploring informational text, searching the internet, and watching penguins live on the penguin cam to learn more about them.  We labeled penguins, wrote facts about them and sang fun songs!

Penguin relay races! We "waddled" holding an "egg" on our feet!

Practicing reading and writing our new words "where" and "there"

Zayne practicing using the word "there" in his Daily 4 journal.

Practicing recognizing, sequencing, and writing numbers to 20.
We also had fun using pretend penguins to add and subtract-
going forward and backward on this number line.

More practice with combinations to 5!

The Mitten

As we continued our Winter unit, we read one of my personal favorites.. The Mitten! We reviewed story elements and practiced retelling the story with our characters and mitten.  We also acted out the story several times using puppets! The students loved performing and watching their classmates put on a fun show!

Acting out The Mitten...practicing story retelling.

The students also used their imaginations to come up with their own character to hide in the mitten.

Camron's dog crawled into the mitten because he was cold.

One of the math centers this week was review and practice of combinations to 5.  They worked with a partner to show different ways to make 5. Our goal is to memorize these combinations!

Combinations to 5

Snowman, Snowman...

Happy New Year! This new year, we discussed resolutions! We brainstormed ideas of what we would like to learn how to do and what we would like to try to do this coming year.  The students painted bells to "ring" in the new year!

Check out Nicky's awesome writing!

As a class, we are going to try to write our last names on our classwork and projects!  We counted how many letters are in our last name, wrote them, and spelled them out to make snowmen.

Snowman last names!

We discussed seasons and weather too! They had so much fun making a "Weather Wheel" to record the weather at home!  This is part of our daily calendar routine, so they were so excited to create one of their own.

We read several stories about snow and snowmen.  A favorite was Snowmen at Night.  In this story, the snowmen magically awaken and do many fun (and silly) things at night.  The students created their own snowman in a tear art project and wrote what their snowman does at night!

Alison wrote: At night my snowman can make a snowman!
Notice how she used a magic "e" to make the /a/ long! 

We made snow globes with our snowman family inside.  The students made a snowman to represent each person in their family.  They wrote about their family in their journal and added what they like to do together in the winter.

Davis' snowman family!