Friday, November 17, 2017

Week Thirteen and Fourteen: November 6th-17th

Happy Friday! It is hard to believe that Thanksgiving is next week. 🦃 We began our Thanksgiving activities today and will continue them next week leading up to our feast!  We are having many conversations about all of the things that we are thankful for.  Below are upcoming dates and then a review of our week.

November 21st Thanksgiving Feast for the kids.  No need to pack them a lunch! Send a snack as usual.  If you have signed up to send in food, please bring it Tuesday morning (in a crockpot would be best so we can plug it in and keep it warm)
November 22nd-24th: No school...Happy Thanksgiving!
December 19th 1:00 PM Gingerbread Houses: Come and decorate a gingerbread house with your child! We will ask for supplies as we get closer to the date.

Self Portraits: Last Thursday, we began working on self-portraits that will be hung around the classroom for the duration of kindergarten and first grade.  We read an amazing book called The Colors of Us and in this book it allows the children to explore all the different skin colors and tones of other people.  We learned that instead of calling people "white", "black", "brown", "tan", etc. we can name our skin tones beautiful names.  Some of the names that we came up with (and some are from the book) are vanilla, caramel, mocha, cinnamon, chocolate, honey, coffee toffee, vanilla icing, and white chocolate.  We then talked about how all of our skin tones and colors are made up of the same mixture of colors (yellow, red, brown, white, and black).  Each student then got to choose a paint color (that Mrs. Rumburg mixed) that matched their skin tone.  They then painted their faces and their ears for their self portraits. This was such a beautiful activity to watch the students do and they were each so excited to pick a beautiful name for their skin tone.  :)

Math: The main concepts that we are focusing on in math right now are counting on, subitizing (recognizing an arrangement of dots immediately like on a dice or domino), basic addition, ten frames, and one more.  We are playing math games during math workshop that focus on all of these skills.  Some of the games played are Ten Frame War, One More, and Domino Parking Lot.

Literacy: It is so exciting seeing the students progress with their letters and sounds and move to the beginning stages of reading!  Reader's workshop looks different for each student because everyone is usually doing different things to fit their needs.  Students are being called for Handwriting Without Tears, some students are being pulled for guided reading groups, some students are writing at the writing table, and some students are rotating through games to practice letters/sounds/sight words/handwriting.  This allows us to pull students to work on their individual needs based on their reading and writing.  Come and volunteer one day if you would like to see what this looks like for us!

Thematic: We finished our unit on Creepy Crawlies this week!  It was fun going on the field trip to the Raptor Center so that we could see some of what we learned about in real life.  We studied bats, spiders, snakes, ants, owls, and more!  We began learning about Thanksgiving this week and are doing lots of different Thanksgiving activities.  When we get back from Thanksgiving break, we will begin our Holidays Around the World unit!  We will study Christmas, Hanukkah, Las Posadas, Kwanzaa, and Sinterklaas.

Have a great weekend!
Love,
Mrs. James 💕

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