Our Valentine's Celebration

Today was our Valentine's Celebration. We started the morning with the prompt "Love is..." The children had such wonderful things to say about love. Most wrote about their family members. We have their responses posted in the classroom. Then, it was time for our Valentine Centers. Each child make a Love Bug cookie, practiced skip counting and creating equal piles with conversation heart candies, and delivered their valentines to their classmates' valentine boxes. Then, they had a few other Valentine centers to choose from. Some students created Love Bug bookmarks, other made sentences with conversation heart candies and illustrated them, some did measuring math activities with their heart candies, and others read valentine books.

Before we knew it, it was time for martial arts. In your child's BEAR book today, they brought home our Martial Arts booklet. Feel free to keep track of their "Acts of Kindness" at home, too. After lunch we headed to the library for a Valentine Story Time with Mrs. Kraal. After Art we delivered our valentines to our big buddies. Finally, it was time for valentines and cookies! We opened all of our valentines and thanked our friends. Some students were very creative with their valentines. Everyone had such good manners. Next we ate (and enjoyed) our Love Bug cookies! Yum!

Finally, we finished the day with the game "Steal My Heart." Students paired up and challenged their partner to see who could "steal" the most heart candies by using only chopsticks! It was SO quiet, you could hear a pin drop! It was such a great fine motor activity and the children had to concentrate to use their chopsticks. They loved it! When the bell rang the students headed out with their valentines, candies, and balloons. Love was in the air! Happy Valentine's Day to all of my little valentines! Enjoy your long weekend and I will see you all on Tuesday!

Tangrams

We read "Grandfather Tang's Story" by Ann Tompert. Then, we used tangram pieces to recreate the characters in the story. Next, each child created their own characters and then they wrote their own stories using the character they created.

Chinese New Year

We learned all about the Chinese New Year. After reading "Lion Dancer: Ernie Wan's Chinese New Year" by Kate Waters and Martha Cooper, we created dragon masks and danced around the room. We also read "Sam and the Lucky Money" by Karen Chinn and then created red money envelopes. During Music, Ms. Price taught us about our zodiac signs. Did you know that horses are talkative. Guess how many horses are in our classroom...16!! We read "How My Parents Learned to Eat" by Ina R. Friedman and then we practiced eating with chopsticks. We ended our celebration with fortune cookies!

Ms. Shapiro's Crayons

Here is the finished product!

"We are a box of crayons,
Each one of us unique.
But when we get together,
The picture is complete!"

Landforms & MLK Jr.

As we learned about "Me on the Map," we discussed landforms and bodies of water that cover our earth. To illustrate what we learned, we created a flip book titled "What is My Earth Made of?" Stop by to check out our finished products!

This week was full of art projects. We did a following directions activity where the children were given basic shapes of paper and then they had to find specific shapes and cut how I indicated to make their own Martin Luther King, Jr. It was amazing to see the similarities and differences among them. We will put them together with illustrations of his dream and our reflection on what we've learned at the end of the week.

Bear Bus & The Crayon Box that Talked

This week we read "The Crayon Box that Talked" by Shane Derolf. I asked the children to think about why we were reading this story and what it had to do with Martin Luther King, Jr. They made the connection that it doesn't matter what we look like, but we are all important and we all need to work together to accomplish our goals. Then, each student drew their self portrait in the oval and cut it out. Then, they chose a crayon to glue their self portrait on. Finally, we will put the crayons together in a crayon box to represent our class box of crayons.

In math, we continued to work on place value by playing Bear Bus. We took turns rolling two dice and putting "bears" onto the bus. If there were more than 10 bears on the bus, the bears would wait at the bus stop. Then, the students recorded how many ones and how many tens of bears were on the bus or waiting.

Welcome Back!

Wow, our first day back and it was filled with fun!  We started off the morning with our first spelling pre-test and for each of the 5 words of the week that the students could already spell correctly, I replaced it with a misspelled word from their writer's notebook.  Your child brought home their list in their backpack.  The children will be tested on these individual lists on Friday.  The spelling test will consist of 5 words, 3 bonus words, and two sentences.

We had a wonderful visit from Ms. Pundt!  We always look forward to spending time with her!

In math, we began a unit on place value.  We reviewed the terms one's and ten's places and then we used cubes and determined how many we had by first counting by 10 and then adding the 1's.

In social studies we began our unit on "Me on the Map."  We talked about when we have used or seen maps before and how they help us.  Then we read "Me on the Map" by Joan Sweeney and began to create our own books.  Since the children are very creative and into art, I knew this would be a perfect project for them!