Happy Thanksgiving

The children enjoyed learning about the first Thanksgiving this week. They did two TLC projects: Pilgrim portraits and an Indian. They have also been illustrating copies of a book, The First Thanksgiving.
Their independent work for center time was a sight word turkey. I explained the project to the class and showed them an example. The children had four days during workstation/center time to complete the work. These turkeys were so cute, we hung them in our windows.


The children made paper plate Pilgrim boys and girls with Mrs. B to sail on the Mayflower on our bulletin board.


I was very proud of the class for all the food items they brought in for the school food drive. The girls brought 50 items and boys brought 40. The boys gave the girls a trucker cheer for their efforts and the girls gave the boys a cowboy cheer for their efforts. I gave all of them a round of applause!

Next week we will watch "Charlie Brown's Thanksgiving" and then share the same feast that Charlie Brown served to his guests.

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!

Spiders Are Not Insects!

That is what we learned in class this week. The children listened to many nonfiction and a few fiction books about spiders. They made TLC spiders and wrote Spider Facts. These spiders are hanging in their webs in our classroom windows.


We sang "Itsy Bitsy Spider" and "There's a Spider on the Floor". The children made TLC illustrations for the nursery rhyme "Little Miss Muffet."


The children did marble paintings to make spider webs and then glued die cut spiders in the webs.


In addition to spider facts and fun, the children listened to The Art Lesson by Tomie de Paola. I showed them how I used sticky notes to leave tracks of my thinking as I was reading. Then they had a chance to record their own thinking on a sticky note and add it to our chart. We talked about the difference between fake reading and real reading. With fake reading, you just say the words without thinking about them. With real reading, you think about what the words mean as you are reading. Right now most of the books that the children read on their own are easy and don't require too much thinking so we practice our thinking strategies with books that I read to them. We have some terrific thinkers in our class!

The children continue to practice reading to themselves and to a partner. They seem to especially enjoy reading with a friend.

Happy Veteran's Day

I know Veteran's Day is not until Thursday, but the children worked so hard on their soldiers and they look so great up in the hallway that I wanted show them off. We listened to Veteran's Day and Hero Dad then made a circle map to share what we knew about soldiers. The soldiers were a two day TLC project. The children also completed the sentence "Soldiers can ___________." It all looks great and our class is proud to honor our military.