10 School Days 'Til Winter Break

Can you believe we are almost to winter break? Wow! Where has the time gone? We are busy preparing for our Winter Performance on December 16th at 1:30pm and the kids are so excited to share with you what we have been working on! Here are a few fun topics that we have been focusing on in class:

Winter Friends

This week we did a directed drawing of snowmen, which we are calling our Winter Friends. Then students traced over their pictures with black sharpies so that they could water color them. Now we are working on writing about our Winter Friends. Students got to pick out a snowman worthy name, some are too funny!! and they are writing about why their Winter Friend is kind. We are partnering this activity with our Kindness unit that we are doing during this holiday season. I will post photos once we have the final products this week. Here are a few photos of the initial drawing/outlining:

Nutrition

Every month your students have the opportunity to have our fabulous nutrition teacher come to show students how to make healthy meals, learn about the different food groups and how to keep their bodies happy and healthy. This week students worked more on food groups and played games where they had to decide which foods we eat go in which food groups. Then students got to plan out a healthy meal with something from every food group. This week students will have a book and an activity coming home that relates to the lesson we had last week! Here are some photos of the kids deciding which food group their food group goes in:

We have two amazing assemblies this week, which I will try to take photos of, and we are practicing more for our Winter Performance! Stay warm this week and let the countdown to break begin!

Smiles,

Miss Adams

Weekly Update

Wow! This week was full of amazing art projects, math that blew my mind and of course lots of amazing writing. Check it out!

My Family

This week we focused on our families, how our families were the same, how they were different and why families are important. With this theme students drew a picture showing who lived in their house, many students reported that they wouldn't be able to fit their whole family in one picture :), so we decided to narrow it down to who we lived with! Then after drawing students labeled their pictures and wrote about it in a list format. I was so impressed with their amazing work and the details they included. Check them out:

My family has my mom and my dad and my brother and my baby sister.

In my family there is my mom and my dad and my brother and Milo!

My family has mom, dad and Jack.

Wants and Needs

In social studies this week we continued discussing what being thankful meant as well as looking at things in our life that we need versus things that we want. Students came up with some amazing examples and they even had quite the conversation about if a cell phone was something that we need or something that we want! Then students got to choose a need and a want to draw and write about. Check them out:

I want a cookie. I need a house.

I want a cupcake. I need water.

I want a princess dress. I need a house.

Sorry this post is so short this week. I am racing to get progress reports done before they go home on Friday! Thank you for sharing your children with me for yet another amazing week! The countdown has begun to Thanksgiving and then Winter Break. I can't believe how fast it is going but I am loving every minute!

Smiles,

Miss Adams

Halloween, Nutrition and Turkeys!

What a busy week we had this week. From starting our week with our Halloween Celebration and ending with gearing up for Thanksgiving we are full steam ahead until Winter Break! I can't believe how fast it is going but as the saying goes "Time flies when you're having fun" :)

Halloween Celebration!

After having a regular morning despite the costumes the kids were ready for some pumpkin themed fun! We started by reading The Monsters Monster which inspired our Frankenstein drawings that you will see below, then students got to rotate between 4 stations: water coloring our Frankenstein's, pumpkin pattern blocks and spooky forest coloring station and finally cotton ball ghosts! We finished off our celebration with "It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown" and of course some treats! Everyone had a great time!

Water coloring the Frankenstein's!

Spider pattern blocks.

Cotton ball ghosts!

Watching the video!

One of the finished Frankenstein's!

Nutrition

We have the wonderful opportunity to work with OSU's nutrition services who comes once a month to teach our class about feeding our bodies healthy foods and taking good care of ourselves. This week we talked about food groups and made "Food Group Friends." The students loved making their friends and counting how many different food groups they had used in their snack! Periodically I will be sending home information about what we are doing in class along with recipes and ideas for your to try at home!

Thankful Turkeys

With Thanksgiving right around the corner we have begun talking about what it means to be thankful. This week we made Thankful Turkeys that have items we are thankful for listed on the feathers. The students were AMAZING at coming up with what they were thankful for and took the project so seriously! I was very impressed and they turned out so well. I mean look at that writing! So great!

We are getting ready for progress reports by doing lots of assessments and of course more thanksgiving activities until Thanksgiving break! Can't wait to see what adventures we have next!

Smiles,

Miss Adams

Pumpkins, Pumpkins Everywhere!

Pumpkin Patch Field Trip 

What an absolutely amazing day we had at the pumpkin patch Friday! So many memories were made and it was wonderful getting to see students making life connections about the pumpkin facts we learned in class. The exclamations of "Look Miss Adams that's the flower growing on the vine! That means a green pumpkin is coming next!" It was music to my ears, not to mention the countless laughs that I heard over the course of getting stuck in the mud and the kids coercing me to go into the Dark Maze with them :) All in all what an enjoyable day we had! Enjoy this post about all the amazing pumpkin crafts and activities we did this week!

Two students enjoying the hay ride.

10 Little Pumpkins Bulletin Board

After learning the poem 10 little pumpkins the students and I did what is called shared writing together to write out the poem. Then we made that writing into a bulletin board where students got to display their hard work and make pumpkins to illustrate the poem. Students are so proud of their work and love showing it off to anybody new who enters our class. Here is what the final product looks like!

Here is a close up of the words!

The finished product!

Field Trip T-Shirts

Another fun art project we did this week was decorating our class t-shirts to wear for the pumpkin patch. We will also use them as art smocks! Students started by painting a skin colored circle on their shirt. Then they got to draw their self portrait onto the shirt with washable markers and finally I puff painted their marker lines to make them permanent. Below you can see the process that we went through to make the shirts. The students loved them and I am so excited to use them all year!

The start of our shirts.

A students self portrait

A students self portrait

A finished shirt.

A finished shirt.

This week we will be doing some writing about our favorite part of the Pumpkin Patch and gearing up for Halloween! So much fun and learning to be had!

Smiles,

Miss Adams

Weekly Update

We are in full swing in October, although I can't believe that your students have been in school for 25 days already! I am loving every minute with your children and I think they are loving it too!

Choice Time

One exploration time that your student has every day is Choice Time, a half hour period where students get to pick an activity and get a chance to socialize, practice their problem solving skills and simply be creative! This week we tried something new that the kids loved. On Wednesday we allowed students to go to either my class, Ms. Krohn's class or Mrs. Carlson's class for choice time where they were able to do different activities as well as getting to play with other students from the other classes. The kids were ecstatic! I heard exclamations of "I made a new friend" or "I got to see kids from my STREAM group!" It was wonderful being able to see them interacting with different kids and enjoying themselves all the while. Here are a few pictures from Wednesday. Also, this week we are changing our sensory table to water and below is a sneak preview of the water beads that we have in there. I have a feeling the water table is going to be a hit ;)

Students at the art table.

Students playing legos.

Students making a block castle!

Our water beads!

Reading/Math Update

In Kindergarten this week I heard exclamations of "I can't believe I'm actually reading a book!" Students were so excited that the skills they have been learning these past weeks have paid off allowing them to read a book on their own! They have been working so hard and I am so incredibly proud of them! Any time we read a book in class I try to send a version of the book home in Friday Folders for them to share their reading with you at home, so keep an eye out for those!

First Graders are working on learning more sight words and understanding "quotation marks" as different speakers. Students really enjoyed getting to use different voices when practicing reading as well as drawing out new words they didn't know with a picture to help them remember that word for next time they come across it!

In Math Kindergarten students are working on numbers 0-10, finding different ways to make those numbers, writing those numbers and really building number sense so we can start looking at how we break apart numbers and put them back together!

In First Grade students are learning all about addition and will start working on weekly math facts that I will be sending home more information about in Friday Folders. This week we will also start talking about doubles math facts (1+1, 2+2) and how we can use facts we already know to solve new problems.

Pumpkin Painting

Also this week we started up with our pumpkin life cycle. Ask your students to act it out for you, they loved getting to walk through the different parts of the pumpkin life cycle with hand motions! To piggy back on this learning we talked about jack o lanterns and how many families choose to use those as decorations for fall/Halloween. So we decided that instead of carving pumpkins we would paint pumpkins to decorate our classroom!

First students drew out their plans for what design/face they wanted on their pumpkin. In reality some students were over ambitious and found that painting a face is a lot harder than drawing a face... but they still turned out cute! Here are some of the students original drawings of what they wanted on their pumpkins.

Then we painted our pumpkins. Students loved getting to decorate theirs however they wanted. They also can't wait to take them home which I said they could do before Halloween :) Here are some pictures of the finished products!

The fun is just beginning as we continue our hard work in class. Keep checking back for more updates on all the amazing experiences your child is having in our K/1 class!

Smiles,

Miss Adams

Apple Writing and Goldfish Party!

What an amazing week we had! I saw amazing progress both academically and socially in every student this week. Here is a quick glimpse into the apple packed week we had. This coming week we are moving on to Pumpkins!

Silly Apples

This week we talked about ways to be a good friend and going along with that idea we discussed our differences and how each person in our class is unique! To go along with our apple study we made unique apples, some with silly eyes, some with silly everything but they kids love having the apples hanging in the back of our classroom to point out to each other and display their hard work. Here are some of the apples hanging up.

Goldfish Party

This week students earned our goal of 100 goldfish tickets. Goldfish are slips of paper that students receive for being safe, respectful or responsible.  As a class we decided that if we reached our goal of 100 goldfish tickets we would have a popcorn movie party! So this week we were able to make that goal and enjoy a short video called "Room on the Broom" while eating some popcorn. Here is a photo of the kids watching the video. They loved it and they deserved it for how hard they were working to earn those Goldfish tickets!

Apple Writing

To finish up our apple unit students wrote about parts of the apple that they had learned about over the course of the unit. I was so impressed with their writing! We even used punctuation. Recently we started working on taking our labels from our pictures (seen in the first two photos below) and putting those into sentences so that we can share our learning with others. This writing is phenomenal and I can't wait to see how we progress over the next weeks.

Apples have seeds, stem, core and a leaf.

Well that is a wrap on apples! This week we are starting STREAM, where your child will get to rotate to different classrooms to do fun art, science or engineering activities with Mrs. Carlson, Ms. Krohn or I. I think the students are going to love it and I promise I will get some pictures up soon!

Smiles,

Miss Adams

Apples, Apples and More Apples

Starting last week and running through this week students have been learning about apples and doing all sorts of apple related activities including labeling, apple counting and even painting (which they were so excited about!) Students will be tasting apples on Wednesday and graphing/analyzing data from our class to decide which apple is the most popular in our room! Students have really been enjoying it! Check out some pictures below!

A student uses finger paints to dot the number of apples.

A student labels the parts of an apple.

A student dot paints the number of apples for each box.

A student colors her apple book.

Dot Painting

Each week students will be exploring a different medium or artistic method, and last week we looked at dot paintings. Given that we are moving into fall I thought it was fitting that our first dot painting be of a fall tree. First we started by drawing out our trees, then we painted in steps. First we painted the trunk, let that dry and then we painted the tree using three different colors. It was a lot of work but they turned out so beautifully! I can't wait to do this again for pumpkins!

After we drew the trees we did the dots on the trunk and branches.

After we drew the trees we did the dots on the trunk and branches.

Then we did dots of yellow, green and red on the tree to make it look like fall.

Then we did dots of yellow, green and red on the tree to make it look like fall.

What a busy few weeks we have coming up as we move into October, but the fun is just beginning and I can't wait to share it with your children.

Smiles,

Miss Adams