February Fun!

Good morning parents and teachers!

February has been full of fun that has kept us engaged and busy!  We work really hard every day during center time to practice and reinforce skills and concepts we have already learned.  We love center time because the theme always changes and aligns with the time of year, the current holiday, or what we are learning about.  These are a few of our centers from the beginning of February:

Unscrambling sight words.

Unscrambling snowflake sentences.

Roll a double die, add the two numbers, and dob!

Build a snowman sight word practice.

One to one correspondence with snowmen.

Practicing place value.

We have also begun working in math journals.  Using our math journals allows to practice envisioning word problems and lays the foundation for multiplication and division.

There are four snowmen.  Each snowman has two mittens.  How many mittens are there in all?

Finally, we learned a lot about George Washington last week.  After the kids made their ADORABLE puppets we used the to share our learning and had a great time!

Stay warm!  :) Mrs. Rogers

Small groups

Hi parents and teachers!

We have been working hard in our small groups during centers and readers workshop :)

We have all been doing different things with our groups to help us become better and stronger readers!

We have been focusing on putting letter sounds together to make words:

The first light is struggling a little bit, sorry!!

We have also been using Stretchy the snake to really streeeeeetch those longer four letter words:

We also started working with a new strategy called Chunky Monkey.  This strategy reminds us to break up a long word into smaller words, or sounds, that we already know.  Then we put them together and read the word!

The kiddos have done so well with these strategies I am looking forward to introducing more soon!

Teachers, Deanna Jump's Guided Reading Packet has been a huge help and great resource for me this year.  Definitely worth checking out!

:) Mrs. Rogers

Winter Fun...100 Day, Groundhog Day, and Arctic Animals

Hi parents and teachers!!
We have had A LOT to fit into these first two weeks of February and then fun is just going to keep coming!  We celebrated Groundhog Day, 100 Day, and learned all about walruses!!

We played this REALLY fun game to celebrate Groundhog Day.  This game helpedus review place value and gave us an opportunity to practice comparing numbers. The berries were each a group of 10 and the acorns were each 1, thegroundhog "ate" whichever side collected more!!  This activity was a FREE download, click the 2nd to last picture for the link to Amanda Hagaman's store!!

100 Day!!  We started with 100 pennies in one piggy bank and learned how we could trade it for 20 nickles, 10 dimes, and one dollar, so cool!

This hidden picture activity was a challenge but the outcome was very exciting for friends who were able to finish! 

We were pizza chefs on 100 day!  We added 10 each of 10 different toppings to make a pizza with 100 different toppings :)

Our 100 day crowns, a great use for all the extra stickers I had floating around.

100 day collections.

We love our dobber paints!!  All of us were able to make 10 groups of 10 dobber dots to make 100 dots!!

Trying to roll our way to 100.  We took turns rolling the dice and colored that many squares each time, we tried really hard to make it all the way to 100, and some of us did!!  Please click here to check out Kathleen Pederson's 100 day unit, it was a great resource and helped to make our day really fun!

100 day was a HUGE success!!  We spent the entire morning rotating through all of the stations to help us celebrate being 100 days smarter :)

Our blubber glove experiment was REALLY fun!!  We learned all about how walruses use blubber to stay warm in the cold, cold arctic!

I was also really impressed with the work the kiddos did on their walrus reports!!  The reports were very challenging and required them to spend a lot of time organizing their thoughts.  These reports tied in nicely with our nonfiction writing unit, hopefully, many of the ideas will carry over!!  GREAT work!!  Many of our arctic animal activities came from Deanna Jump's Arctic Animals unit.

Stay warm!  :) Mrs. Rogers

Writer's Workshop: Informational Text

Hi parents and teachers!!

We have been busy working on our SIXTH writing unit, writing informational text.  I love all of our writing units, but I love this one the BEST!  The children are writing concrete facts about things that they know a lot about and their writing pieces really show the wealth of knowledge they have to share!!  The students' sentence mechanics also start to improve leaps and bounds during this part of the year and it's really neat to see their growth!

We started our unit by making a list of things we know a lot about!!  We spent time talking about how it was important to write about things we know so we can create an interesting book.

After a few days of writing we took some time to talking about brainstorming before we write.  We learned how important it is to know at least FIVE things about our topic before we start writing!!

We have worked REALLY hard to increase our writing stamina to 17 minutes!!

Here is a peek at one of our finished books!!

Some of the other topics the kiddos have chosen to write about are the Bears, spiders, the titanic, ponies, scorpions, cats, eagles, and fish!!

Teachers, if you like what you see this unit can be purchased on TPT from Deanna Jump!!  Click the picture for a link (highly recommended!)

Mrs. Rogers :)