Friday, August 29, 2014

A Glimpse Of Our Week!

Last week we celebrated our first birthday.  It was fun to celebrate Kamden's birthday with him!


Last Wednesday we had the opportunity to participate in an ALS Ice Bucket Challenge.  Mrs. Cummings recently participated and challenged Mrs. Crayton, our school counselor, Mrs. Daniel, our school cafeteria manager, and Ms. Sweazy, our Physical Education teacher.  Brady, Luella, and Brennan dumped the buckets of ice water as the rest of the class cheered.

Brady and Ms. Sweazy
Brennan and his grandma, Mrs. Daniel
Luella and Mrs. Crayton
Every morning we practice greeting each other during our morning meeting.  
Our conversations during our morning meeting relate to our Listening and Speaking Learning Targets for this grading period:
- I can follow class rules for discussion.
- I can speak loudly and express my thoughts clearly.

This week we went fishing for friends in our pretend pond.  As the students "caught" a friend they practiced greeting them.



 We also practiced reading our poem of the week, Time for School, each day.  This week we learned how to add the poem to our poetry journal and learned how to draw a detailed illustration to match.

Here is a video of the students singing the poem.  Aren't they great readers already?

Lastly - a few fun pictures of the students exploring Learning Centers which we do on occasion at the end of the day.





 Check back soon for more updates!

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

A New School Year!

Wow!  We have had a great start to the year!  
The first five days have been busy but very, very fun!

Just look at those sweet faces!

We have been very busy building our classroom community, making new friends and learning the routines and procedures of our classroom.

Each morning, while we are practicing our classroom routines, the students have had the opportunity to explore some of our classroom materials.

The students have enjoyed working on puzzles using pattern blocks.



The students have practiced making upper and lowercase letters with our play dough mats.


 


The students have also practiced forming letters using unifix cubes, which we typically use during math workshop.



 A lot of our learning incorporates singing and movement.  We sing and dance all day long!  The students have enjoyed learning some fun songs too!



In these pictures they are singing and dancing to one of their favorite songs, 
A Tooty Ta Ta.  
Check it out here!

On Friday our class received a special package with "magical" play dough.
We received a letter from Pete the Cat and followed the instructions.


We repeated the chant that the letter instructed us to say several times.  
We waited and watched the magic take place!


As the students began to squeeze and roll the play dough it changed from white to a bright color, either blue, red, orange, green, or yellow.

The looks on their precious faces were priceless.  It was one of the best moments of our week!






Each day we have a classroom King or Queen.  We practice cheering the letters in the King or Queen's name and we draw an illustration of the special student.  
As a class we practice listening and speaking during a short interview in which we ask questions to learn more about our special friend.


To make our classroom royalty feel extra special they receive a special crown and chair pocket.  Each student in our class will have the opportunity to be King or Queen for the day.

I am so excited about this year.  It is an honor to have your child for their first year in school.  Please follow our classroom blog so you can be notified when I publish new posts!