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.