We had fun celebrating our 100th day of school yesterday.  We began the day by making crowns, then many collections of 100 were created, everyone enjoyed searching for tiny pictures to 100 (I think your child can best explain this!), we wrote about 100 things we would like to have and what we would do with them (ice cream cones, pieces of gold), and even squeezed in a snack of 100 things, although a few children may have just eaten the 10 m&m's.  With anticipation of the snow storm added in it was a very exciting day.

Next Friday we will be having a Valentine's celebration with Ms. Gale's class.   Yesterday your child should have come home with a list of all the children in kindergarten to help with making valentines.  If your child chooses to bring valentines please make sure there is one for everyone!  These can be home-made or store-bought and as simple or elaborate as you and your child decide.

Hooray for snow!

Happy 100th day!

Building with 100 geo-blocks.

Searching for pictures to 100.

Found one!

An animals in winter scene created with third and fourth grade partners.

The coyote is following the rabbit down to the stream.  Notice the tracks!

Despite the weather, we have been getting outside as much as we can.  Yesterday we took advantage of slightly warmer temperatures (although the wind was still pretty wild!) and sticky snow.  We spent an extra long time outside because everyone was so engaged in building and playing.

Last week during ECO everyone had a chance to use animal track molds to create a tracking story in sand.  Each child was also able to make their own mold using plaster of paris.  We will continue with the tracking theme this week.  On Thursday we began working on dioramas of animals in winter with our third and fourth grade partners.  This week we will use clay to complete the scenes.

During math we began a fun unit on shapes.  We have been exploring shapes and noticing defining features of each shape and comparing different shapes.  We also imagined what different shapes could be and used the shapes to create pictures.

Enjoying the slightly warmer temperatures.

The beginnings of a snow fort.

Creating a winter scene in a box.

Tracking stories in the sand.

Raccoon track.

An oval can be a cat!

Thank you to everyone for attending last night's concert.  I appreciate the extra effort it takes to return to school after a full day!  The children were all excited to be here and excited to have everyone in the class here as well.  Many reported feeling a little nervous on stage in front of so many people.  They should be commended for doing such a great job!

To coincide with the full moon (which was actually last night), we gathered with Mrs. Gale's class and read the book Owl Moon, by Jane Yolen.  We followed the book by creating our own owls in the night.  It seems that tonight may be clear and the moon will still be quite full- possibly a good night for owling!  Enjoy the three day weekend.

We had a great ECO session yesterday despite being inside for most of the morning.  We spent time learning about different animal gaits, and how these are connected to an animal's build.  After talking about the four gaits, we had a chance to try them out.  Some were more challenging than others!  Children then used what they know about their nature name animals to try to pick their gait (children with birds were given substitute animals for this).  We were then able to go outside for a very brief time for a few games.

Today Eric Mongeon introduced our class to the ipads.  After talking about how to handle the ipads safely and responsibly and reviewing a few key features (volume!), children had time to explore a drawing app.  I am working on getting everyone in the class set up with an account in Lexia Core5, which is an application that provides explicit personalized learning in literacy.  Once each child has an account we will be able to use the ipads in small groups during literacy time to work on specific literacy skills.

Just a reminder that our school-wide music concert is next Thursday evening at 6:00, in the gym.

New nature name name tags from our ECO leader Angie Barger.

Waddling like a bear, walking like a deer.

Exploring the ipads.

I hope everyone had a fantastic vacation!  With such a long break we have spent a lot of time in our first days back reviewing expectations, especially focusing on what it means to be kind, safe, engaged, and responsible during each part of our days.  We are working on creating a board game that will help reinforce these expectations and also give us practice with math skills.

We have also been talking about animals in winter and what different animals do to survive when it gets cold and snowy.  We have been sorting animals into three categories:  those that migrate, those that are active and need to find food, and those that hibernate (noting that some animals sleep very lightly and may even wake up and therefore aren't true hibernators).  We have read several books about animals in winter and have begun taking notes on what we learn, using pictures and words on larger posters for easy reference.   We will use these notes to do an informational piece of writing in the next few weeks.  We have also been acting out different animals in winter, which has given us some much needed movement when we've been unable to go outside!  I am hoping to do a visual project as well and would like to collect one shoe boxes or similar sized box for each child.  If you have any to share please send them in! (I have several already.)

I was away at an all day math meeting yesterday, and it was so nice to be back in the classroom today!  There is nothing like sitting for most of the day to make me appreciate the bustle of the classroom.  We spent some time playing a new math game called bump today.  While we practiced adding two dice together, but more importantly worked on being good partners and good sports.  We also did some snowman problem solving and began a snowman project based on the book Snowballs by Lois Ehlert.

This afternoon while we were partner reading using books from our classroom library, using sticky notes to mark pages that we wanted to share because they were funny, exciting, or interesting in some other way.  A pair of partners approached me breathless with excitement.  They had marked a page because they could read the words in this book that was a "real" book (rather than one of the little leveled books that we use to practice reading words).  Their excitement was contagious as they shared the page and read it together to the class, and this led us to a discussion of the pay off for all of the hard work we do, learning sight words, using our fingers to point to words, getting our mouths ready with beginning sounds, and making sure we practice reading in some capacity every day- we are all really learning to read!

A belated thank you to everyone for coming to conferences.  I appreciate the extra effort it can take to make an evening meeting!  I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday- based on children's writing it sounds like you did.

This week we spent some time learning about Hanukkah.  We read lots of Hanukkah stories, compared Hanukkah to Christmas, noting lots of similarities between the two, and played dreidel with our third and fourth grade partners.  Eliana also very graciously helped everyone make a candle.  Next week we will shift our focus to Kwanzaa.

We are also wrapping up our exploration of rocks this week.  Today we used clay to model the rock cycle and the constant changes that rocks undergo.  We also created a rock story with movement to help us remember this cycle.

It felt really good to return to the forest for ECO on Wednesday.   The last several sessions we have been breaking into small groups and working through stations.  I think cooking over the fire is definitely a favorite- this week we roasted apples.  The weather looks good for next Wednesday as well, and although it is an early release day we will have ECO.

Thank you for helping your child come to school with appropriate clothing for going outside.   Hopefully the snow will return soon, and recess is much more enjoyable when we are all warm and dry or as dry as we can be!

Bees wax candles.

A group effort- nearly everyone in the class helped create this!

Walking in the forest.