February 22nd, 2013- Road Construction in Rainbow City

Highlights from the Week:

• Special Theme of the Week: Community Helpers
• Heart Word of the Week: little
• In language arts, we practiced summarizing a story we read.  We read a nonfiction article about various jobs and talked about how many nonfiction books/articles have captions.  We also practiced coming up with rhyming words in the -ap family, blending sounds together in order to read them, and counting the syllables in our names.
• In writing, we drew a picture of ourselves doing a job that we want to do when we grow up.  We also wrote a speech bubble describing what we are.
• In math, we have started working on story problems.  We are solving addition and subtraction problems using pictures.
• During social studies, we continued to develop our city.  We "built" roads using tape, learned some driving rules and took a driver's test.  We also created signs for our roads.  This week, we also talked about laws and we came up with some laws for our city.
• During community centers, our city was open.  We added three new businesses.  We now have a fire department that puts out any fires we may have.  We also added a police department.  Police officers hand out tickets to students that have been caught being good!  A band was also added this week so we could get more money for our city and also deposit extra money we did not need.

February 15th, 2013- Rainbow City Opens

Highlights from the Week:

• Special Theme of the Week: Community Helpers
• Heart Word of the Week: was
• In language arts, we read a story and practiced figuring out the main idea of the story and the supporting details.  We also practiced summarizing the important events in the story.  In addition, we came up with rhyming words in the -un family, practiced blending sounds together to form a word, and practiced clapping syllables in our names.
• In writing, we practiced writing an opinion piece.  We wrote about something we liked and why we liked it.
• In math, we were introduced to a new math center called, Spin and Write.  With this center, we are practicing recognizing numbers, writing numbers, counting, and comparing quantities.
• In social studies, we talked more about our city and what we wanted to have in it.  We brainstormed ideas for a name for our city and then voted for our favorite one.  This week, we also decided to make signs for all of our businesses so people would know what business is in each spot.
• During community centers, we opened many of the shops in our city.  So far, we have Pizza Hut, a library, an art museum, a pet shop, a bakery, a vet, a construction zone, Home Depot, and a school.  We hope to add more businesses in the upcoming week!

 

 

 

Gingerbread House Construction

Gingerbread House Construction

Brainstorming what we want our gingerbread house to look like:

*We thought about what shape we wanted the doors and windows

*We thought about how many windows we want

*We labeled our brainstorm

Presenting our ideas to the class:

 

Drawing our shapes on our gingerbread house:

 

Designing what decorations we would like on the house:

• We came up with ideas of what types of "candy" we would like and where to put them
• We also labeled what "candy" we want

Painting our gingerbread house:

Painting the roof and decorating it with hand print "snow" and pillow stuffing for "snow":

Creating and adding more decorations to our gingerbread house:

Our finished Gingerbread House!

February 8th, 2013- Community Helpers

Highlights from the Week:

• Special Theme of the Week: The start of Community Helpers
• Heart Word of the Week: and
• In language arts, we practiced figuring out the main idea of a nonfiction story and describing some of the supporting details.  We read another nonfiction story about maps and learned about what maps tell us and some of the key elements of a map.  We also practiced coming up with rhyming words, clapping syllables, and blending sounds together to read a word.
• In writing, we focus for the week was making sure the first letter in our sentence is capital.
• In math, we added a new center that teaches us about pennies and nickles.  It's called, "Beat you to 15 cents".  With this center, we are practicing exchanging pennies for nickles and comparing quantities.  During our Number Corner time (calendar), we are learning about 3 dimensional shapes.  We are learning what objects in the real world are spheres, cylinders, cubes, and cones.  
• During social studies, we started talking about community helpers.  We talked about how neat it was to have a hot chocolate shop in our classroom and decided it would be really cool to fill our classroom with all types of shops.  After reading some books and learning about shops within a town, we decided it would be a great idea to turn our classroom into a town!  Be have been working hard brainstorming what we want our town to look like.
• During community centers, we continued with retelling the story of, The Mitten.  We also continued building hibernation homes out of blocks and drawing on a map a birds journey south.  Our favorite center has  continued to be our construction zone with our ice blocks.  We have really enjoyed figuring out all the neat things we can build with all the different sizes and shapes.