December 20th, 2012- Holidays Around the World

Highlights from the Week:

• Special Theme of the Week: Holidays Around the World
• Heart Word of the Week: are
• In language arts, we learned about inferences.  We learned that inferences are when you use your brain and clues from a book to come up with an idea.
• In math, we have been practicing using positional words.  For our December calendar, we are describing where a bear is in relation to a box.  We are also building knowledge that teen numbers consist of a group of ten and a few left over.
• During our social studies time, we have been traveling to other countries.  We take a pretend flight to the country and before they could enter the country, they had to have their passport stamped.  While in the country, we read a story, learned about a symbol and a traditional food of that country.  On our flight back to the United States, we fill out some information in our passport about the country.  We then sample some of their traditional food.  
• During our community centers, we finished up our gingerbread house and cleaned up some of our old centers. 

Filling out our passports

 Boarding the plane with our ticket

 Flying

 Filling out our passport about the country

 Trying a latke

 Trying a benne cake

 Pretending we are in a house and learning about Las Posadas

 Trying arroz con leche (rice and milk)

 Holiday Party

 

 Video conference with Mrs. Claus

December 14th, 2012- More gingerbread fun!

Highlights from the Week:

• Special Theme of the Week: Gingerbread
• Heart Word of the Week: play
• In language arts, we worked on summarizing stories we had read.  We also worked on making sure we use the pictures to help us understand a story better.
• During writing, we wrote our own version of the gingerbread man.  Instead of a runaway gingerbread man, we had a runaway kitten!
• In math, we were introduced to skip counting and what it means to count by 2's.
• To practice math skills, creativity, and problem solving, we made gingerbread houses!
• During our theme time, we continued to read versions of the gingerbread man, but they have become more and more different.  We have had a run away clay boy, pickle, and ice cube!  We talk about how these books are the same as some of the others that we read and how they are different.
• During community centers, we are continuing with our life sized gingerbread house.  This week we are working on the decorations.  Also during community centers, we are continuing to retell the story of the gingerbread man in our dramatic play center.

We really enjoyed making our gingerbread houses!!

December 11th, 2012- Gingerbread Fun

Highlights from the Week:

• Special Theme of the Week: Gingerbread
• Heart Word of the Week: is
• In language arts we are working on story structure and characters.  We are also working on rhyming and figuring out the beginning and ending sounds of words.
• In writing, we created a gingerbread man story about where he was hiding.  We worked on using preposition words and descriptive words.  To publish our story, we glued it onto a piece of construction paper, added arms, legs, and a head to make it look like a gingerbread man.
• In math, we were introduced to a growing pattern.  With this, we worked on the skills of adding one more, observing/describing likenesses and differences, and counting by 1's and 2's.
• During our theme time, we continued to compare different versions of the gingerbread man.  They are starting to become more and more different than the traditional story. 
• During community centers, we are continuing with many gingerbread themed centers.  At our construction zone, we continued with the construction of our gingerbread house.  This week we worked on painting it.  At the math center, we have been enjoying measuring how many gingerbread men long things are.  We also started learning a little about area by measuring how many objects can fit inside of a gingerbread man. 

Measuring how many cheerios fit inside of a gingerbread man

 Painting the roof of our gingerbread house.

 Reading in the book hut

Measuring how many gingerbread long we are.

Decorating a gingerbread man with many different materials!

 Putting gingerbread men in number order.

 Making Rudolf out of our feet and hands.

November 30th, 2012 - Missing Gingerbread Man

 

Highlights from the Week:

• Special Theme of the Week: Gingerbread
• Heart Word of the Week: have
• In language arts, we practiced recognizing the story structure.  In addition, we have been working on isolating the various sounds within a word.
• In writing, we worked on adding descriptive words to our writing.
• In math, we made a paper quilt and explored the various patterns we saw in the quilt.
• During our theme time, we have been reading various versions of the gingerbread man.  We have been comparing the characters in each of these stories.
• Our community centers have a variety of gingerbread themed centers.  At our dramatic play, we are retelling the story of the gingerbread man.  At our math center, we are measuring how long things are using a gingerbread ruler.  The ruler tells us how many gingerbread men long things are.  At our art center, we are using a variety of materials to decorate a gingerbread man.
• We are also really excited about our "construction project".  We decided we wanted to build a gingerbread house in our classroom, so we are going through a similar process of a real construction worker.  We started  by brainstorming where we wanted the house in our classroom.  We talked about it with our friends and then presented it to the class.  We voted and decided we wanted the house to be at the entrance of our classroom so we could pretend our whole classroom was a gingerbread house.  We then talked about how we needed to design the house before we built it.  We drew pictures of what we wanted the house to look like and practiced our writing skills by making labels.  Next, we voted on what design we wanted to do.  Then, we drew the doors and the windows on our house and Mrs. Matulis cut it out.  We are looking forward to painting our house and designing what types of decorations we would like.

The Making of our Gingerbread Man

 

Santa dropped off some "magic" gingerbread dough



 

Preparing the Gingerbread Man

 

Decorating the Gingerbread Man

 

 

 

Delivering the Gingerbread Man

 

When we went back to get him, he was gone!

We searched around the school and found shadows and clues.

We ended back in our classroom and the Gingerbread Man had left us some cookies.  We each took one bite of the cookie and then graphed which part of the body we ate first.  More people took a bite out of the leg first.