February 1st, 2013- Animals in Winter

Highlights from the Week:

• Special Theme of the Week: Animals in Winter
• Heart Word of the Week: do
• In language arts, we practiced identifying the beginning, middle, and end of a story.  In addition, we have been practicing sorting words by short and long vowels.  We are also coming up with rhyming words within a particular word family.
• In writing, we worked on writing a story about one event and elaborating on the event by telling details.
• In math, we have started to learn about money!  We were introduced to two new math centers where we are learning about pennies and nickles.  We are building the concept that a penny is worth one cent and a nickle is worth five cents.  We are also working on building the concept that you can trade a nickle for five pennies.
• In science, we are learning that in the winter animals migrate, hibernate, or stay active and adapt to the weather.
• During community centers, we are building in our construction zone with "ice blocks".  In dramatic play, which is a Hot Chcolate Shop, we are continuing to practice writing orders and menus.  At another center, we are mapping out a journey for a bird so it can fly south.  We then count how many cubes long that journey will be.  Also during centers, we are building hibernation homes out of blocks for some of our stuffed animals.

No Formal Newsletter this Week

Due to the short week and snow days, there is no formal newsletter this week.  Below are a few reminders:

January Home Project Due January 31st.

Scholastic Book Orders Due Monday.

Hollywood Variety Show is Friday, February 1st at the High School.  We will be having a dress rehearsal during the day on Thursday, January 31st.  Please have your child where a white shirt and jeans to school on Thursday.

Our class play, The Mitten, will be Friday, February 8th at 2:30 here at Hollywood.  Check your child's folder to see what part they will be in the play. 

January 17th, 2013- Ice Exploration

Upcoming Events:

• Our class will be doing an act in the Hollywood Variety Show on Friday Jan. 1st at 7:00pm.  A note was sent home Monday and today.  More information will continue to come home.  The class is very excited to be performing on the High School stage!
• We will also be putting on a play called, The Mitten on Jan. 8th at 2:30 here at Hollywood.  A note is coming home today.  More information will be coming home to give you additional details.  This play goes along with all of our learning about winter and the skill of retelling stories.

Highlights from the Week:

• In language arts we practiced making predictions and checking to see if our predictions are correct.  We also worked on recognizing the structure of a book: ABC book, 123 book, book with a pattern, book with a beginning, middle, end, etc.  We have also been practicing with some rhyming.
• In writing, we wrote a story about what a snowman does a night, which was inspired by the story, Snowmen At Night.  While writing this, we worked on adding details to our words by adding where or when the snowman did the activity.
• In math, we were introduced to a new center called, Beat You to 20.  With this center, we are working on recognizing numbers, counting, comparing quantities, and adding together.
• In science, we continued to learn about ice through experimentation.  We picked some liquids, put them in a freezer overnight, and then checked them to see if they froze.  We discovered that shampoo, hair gel, juice, and paint freeze.  Vegetable oil froze, but melted extremely quick.  Hand sanitizer did not melt at all.  We then recorded what we learning about ice in our individual science books.
• During community centers, we maintained our current centers.  We finally finished painting our "ice blocks" so no we are going to start building with them!

January 11th, 2013

Highlights from the Week:

• Special Theme of the Week: Winter
• Heart Word of the Week: for
• In language arts, we are working on making inferences while we read and summarizing what happened once we are done.  We are also practicing orally breaking apart words into their individual sounds.
• In writing, we worked on adding details to our writing that answer who, when, and where.
• In math, we have started to learn about money.  We were introduced to a center that practices comparing amounts of pennies.  We are also exploring shapes during our calendar time.  We are learning how shapes fit together and how shapes can be made using different shapes.
• In science, we are beginning to learn about winter.  We are writing our own little science books.  We started by recording what we already know about winter and what we want to know.  We also recorded in our science book how we will learn about winter.  We learned that one way to learn about winter is to explore, so we explored ice.  While we explored ice we made observations, came up with ideas, and created some questions we want to investigate.  One question we came up with is how can we melt an ice cube the fastest.  We then conducted an experiment to figure out the answer to our question.
• During community centers, we have added a few winter themed activities.  At the art center, we are making and painting a snowman using marshmallows as our brushes.  We are painting "ice blocks" (brown boxes) so we can build with them next week.  Also, in dramatic play, we have opened a hot chocolate shop where we are practicing writing down orders, making orders, and exchanging money.

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.