Friday, December 18, 2009

Busy Week

This week we had a super busy week at school. Monday night we had our cookie decorating with families event. I didn't even take any pictures! I am sorry about the chair situation and not having enough chairs for everyone to sit and relax. We live and learn! I hope that you enjoyed coming out and decorating a cookie with your family.

We also had pajama day at the end of this week. On Thursday afternoon we watched "Up" in our classroom with just our little group. Friday morning and Friday afternoon we watched "Surf's Up!" with Miss Jen and Miss Erin's classes in the room next door projected on the wall. It was like being at the movies. We all had fun in our pajamas and enjoyed seeing each other's pajamas! Friday afternoon we also celebrated Ella's birthday.

Make sure to read your newsletters and the attached schedule about changes to transportation on January 14th and 15th.

Have a safe and relaxing holiday break!







Friday, December 11, 2009

This week and last!

I just realized that I never posted pictures from last week! So you will get two slideshows this week. First, we have pictures from last week when the TTH class and M-F AM class made crayons and then used them. There are also some pictures of our stoplight activity.



This week we started the book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. We did several fun activites to go along with the story. But before we did that, we went on a picture walk. I went through the book with the class and didn't read any of the words. We talked about the pictures and what we thought could be happening in the story and why. This is a great skill to develop because it will help with inferencing skills later.

For example:
-Me "What do you think is happening here?"
-Child "The mouse will eat a cookie."
-Me "Why do you think that?"
-Child "Because the boy is holding a cookie in his hand and the mouse is getting it".
-Me "Oh! I see that too. I also see that in this next picture there are crumbs on the ground. That must mean he ate it".

This is just an example of questioning skills to use when reading with your child. I took some dictation during our activity (one sentence per page) to allow each child to inference what could be happening in the picture.




Below is a slideshow of some pictures from work time this week. There are also some videos of our snack song! You will notice that before we sing the "Open Shut Them" song, we do the "Gobble Gobble Crunch Crunch" with "silly 3s"....holding up the thumb, first finger and middle finger. That is actually the number 3 in sign language.

Using those fingers is very important for hand stability when learning to write. Anything you can have your child do using those three fingers will help with writing. They can use them to pick up popcorn when you are having a snack or use them to pick up little toys when playing...you can make a game out of it...no body can eat snack without using only those fingers! We practice opening and closing them every day before snack.