Gingerbread and More

Our class has had a busy month during December. Jingle, the elf, visited our class and everyday would watch us from a different place in the room. Every night, he would report to Santa and tell him if we were naughty or nice. A child was chosen each day to write in Jingle's journal to tell where he was in the room.

We did a unit on the gingerbread man and read many different versions of the story. We made a TLC Gingerbread Man book and we finished the unit by making gingerbread houses. We had lots of parent help and that made a big difference. Thanks to all our wonderful parents. Here are photos of all the fun in progress.

And the finished products ...

The children made candy cane ornaments using beads and a pipe cleaner. They had red, green and white beads and had to make a pattern on their candy canes. I also made snowman ornaments using the children's hand prints decorated with paint pens to look like snowmen.


The children did several art projects making elves, reindeer, and Santas. They wrote wish lists for Santa.






Our class participated in a Christmas card exchange with 24 other elementary classes from across the country. We put all our cards up on the bulletin board and connected them with yarn and push pins to the states they were from.


December was a great month. Now we are looking forward to the new year with studies on snow, Arctic and Antarctic animals.

Happy New Year!

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.

Bats! Bats! Bats!

The children really enjoyed learning about bats this week. We read lots of nonfiction. The children shared their knowledge of bats by making a bat tree map. Then the children made a TLC bat picture and dictated bat facts for the pictures. These are displayed in the hallway. They made bat wrist puppets and wrote a sentence about their bats.

Bat Facts

The children listened to Stellaluna and then made paper bag Stellaluna puppets. They completed sentences telling about Stellaluna and glued these on the back of the puppets. We read about owls one day and made a diagram comparing owls and bats, telling how they were alike and different.



Since school began, the children have been reading to themselves (Read to Self time) every day for longer periods each day. They are up to 12 minutes of reading time now. This week they learned the procedures for reading to a friend (Read to Someone time). Partners sit EEKK, elbow to elbow and knee to knee. They take turns reading to each other, either from the same book or different books. Mrs. B and I move around the room listening to different pairs read. The children did a great job for their first Read to Someone time. From now on, we will alternate between Read to Self and Read to Someone.

Fall and Scarecrows

Although the weather is still warm and it doesn't feel too much like fall, our theme for the week was the season. We read and talked about the signs of fall and sang our song about the four seasons. The children made fall trees to illustrate the poem "Fall Leaves".

We made the funniest class book, Scarecrow, Scarecrow. The children drew pictures of scarecrows. I took pictures of the children looking like they were scared and paired the pictures with the rhyme: Scarecrow, scarecrow, how scary can you be? You scared Sofia (each child's name went here) but you didn't scare me! The photos/rhymes went in the book opposite the scarecrows each child drew. It has become a favorite class book.

The children made really cute TLC scarecrows and we hung those in the hall. Next week's theme is bats. We are looking forward to that and to Family Reading Night on Tuesday. We have some fun nursery rhyme activities planned for that night.

Fire Safety

We had fun learning about fire safety this week. The children colored and cut out Fire Safety Sam and then wrote fire safety rules for Sam to hold. They made TLC firemen and firetrucks. All of this made a great display in the hallway. We sang "I'm A Firefighter" and added the song/poem to our poetry books. Every week we add a poem or song to the books. We read them and highlight letters, letter chunks, punctuation and words. We read many nonfiction books about fire safety and watched "Play Safe, Be Safe" with Fireman Dan. We used toilet paper tubes to make firefighter puppets.

The children finished their body parts scarecrows by adding movable arms and legs after talking about our muscles and how they help us move.
In math, we worked on positional words - above, below, between, beside, near, far. The children began reading patterns and copying them.

Next week we will begin our Fall theme which we will work on over the next few weeks.