March 1st, 2013- Rainbow City Closes

Highlights from the Week:

• Special Theme of the Week: Community Helpers
• Heart Word of the Week: said
• In language arts, we practiced visualizing in our heads what was being read.  We also worked on figuring out the main idea and details of a story.  In addition, we came up with rhyming words in the -op family, practiced blending sounds together in order to read them, and counting the number of syllables in a word.  A couple weeks ago, we also started focusing on letter formation and handwriting.  We started with "o" and "c".  We then focused on "a" and "d".  This week, we are working on "g" and "q".
• In math, we are continuing to work on sea creature story problems.  For one of our story problems, it told us that there were three whales and we had to figure out how many fins they had altogether.  We are not starting to create our own story problems.
• During our writing time, we have been working on a visitor's guide to our city.  With our visitor's guide, we practice writing our heart word this.  We also created a real map of our city and where the businesses are.  We then made a key for the map so people would understand what each of the pictures represented.
• In social studies, we learned about goods and services.  We learned that goods are things that are made or grown that people can buy.  We learned that services are things that people do for you.  We also learned about needs and wants through a fun "shopping" activity.  Last Friday, we got "paid" for working in our city.  We had a calendar that showed what we were going to buy each day of the week.  The things that they were buying were pictures of the items.  On Monday was toy day, but we were told that we could wait until Friday and buy toys then.  On Tuesday, we talked about how clothes are a need, so everyone had to buy some clothes.  On Wednesday, we talked about how everyone needs food, so everyone had to buy some food.  All week long, we talked about how everyone needed to save $10 because they had to pay rent.  We talked about how a home is a need.  By Thursday, rent was due, but many had run out of money.  Therefore, they had to do extra jobs around the classroom like washing tables in order to earn enough money for rent.  On Friday, whoever had money left was able to buy some "extra special" toys.  We had a really good time learning about needs/wants and saving money through our "shopping" activities this week.
• During community centers, we continued visiting and playing in the various businesses in the city.  The science lab opened this week and we explored gak that was made as a class.  After four long weeks of developing and playing in our city, it is now closed.  We are moving onto Dr. Suess next week!

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!