1/15- 1/16

If you have walked into class, you hopefully have seen the children's mitten writing hanging in the hall. They had a lot of fun with our activities based on Jan Brett's The Mitten, and enjoyed looking through magazines for just the right pictures to hide under their own mittens in the snow. When writing the names of the hidden animals, we worked together to sound out each animal. Some did it totally on their own, some needed to copy a prompt, and some needed to trace. We all worked hard and took pride in our work. You'll notice there are quite a few misspelled words. That's OK! Each child wrote what they heard, and that is just fine for this age. In fact, it's wonderful to see them take ownership and realize they CAN do it!

Follow this link to see an epubbud digital book of our writing: Who's Hiding Under My Mitten? You can also find it on the Class Books page above.

We worked on a snowglobe project. Here we are adding a snowman and some snowflakes to the background of our project. We are adding a little detail each day, so these won't be finished for a bit.

We worked on geoboards yesterday and today at our math center. I saw lots of shapes being made (which was our main focus) but also lots of rockets, guitars, and letters. We also had another math center working on making sets with beads on little number flags (but no pics of that).

Our squishy insta snow in the sensory table has been replaced with buffalo snow and our polar animals.

In the writing center, we pulled magnetic letters out and used them on the magnetic dry erase boards to write and draw.

For our morning job today, we needed to slowly trace the animal track paths in the snow to the correct animal. It was a lot harder than it looked!

At circle time today, we started focusing on a new letter: Ee! This has been one of the hardest letters to write for most of us, so we'll be doing lots more practice. Since Ee is a vowel, we talked about how it has two sounds. Just looking at our morning message with all the red Ee's showed us how important this letter is to writers. We had lots of name fixing to do- it just isn't right if we don't have all those Ee's! We then read Elmer the Elephant and Elmer in the Snow. We'll keep on with our Elmer books for the rest of the week.

After reading, we got to work making patchwork elephants out of all those milk jugs sent in last week. It was a big sticky job gluing the tissue paper down, but we did it!

After finishing step one of our elephants, we had several activities to choose from for the rest of center time. Reading books, geoboards, puzzles, lite brite letters, the magnet maze, sensory table and fine motor toys were all available. After centers, we had another circle time where we went over the calendar and learned a few more letters for our Letter Tales song. With most of our singing time before the break devoted to Thanksgiving and Christmas program songs, it's been a long time since we worked on learning the signs for letters and animals. We're looking forward to getting the whole alphabet into our song!

See you tomorrow!