Happy Birthday Kansas!

We spent this past week learning facts about Kansas. All of our centers were related to the Kansas theme also. Due to the fact that I was so busy trying to work on assessments and get prepared for conferences I didn’t take very many pictures this week. I promise to be better next week! I hope the kids shared the Kansas book that we made and what we learned about the state we live in!

On Friday we celebrated Kansas’ birthday and wore our favorite Kansas shirt in support of our favorite team. We made Jayhawks and wildcats and here are the outcomes of the favorites. A class divided!

Layton had to leave early and I didn’t get his picture taken…he is a TRUE KSU fan and I hope he wasn’t too upset after the game Saturday night! Kansas Sunflowers, Kansas Wheat, Kansas Jayhawks are hard to beat!

Penguin Parade

This week was all about Penguins and it was a good week for it because it was SO cold all week long we felt like we were in Antarctica! Learning about penguins was a lot of fun! All of our centers were Penguin themed. Here is a few of the things we did this week:

 

We learned that penguins live in “Rookeries” (large families) so we did “Fact Families” with our penguins. We also used penguin counters to do subtraction facts and writing number sentences.

We learned a poem about Emperor Penguins and how the dad is the best dad because he takes care of the baby for so long while the mother goes out to get food. They did penguin word building with beginning consonants and blends and matching it with a word family to create as many words as we could.

Our listening center was about how Emperor Penguins live. We then created a story book about these Amazing Birds! A couple of other centers that I didn’t get pictures of were building sentences about penguins, penguin antonyms, and contractions. I am always so amazed at how they work at center time and during their centers I get to teach each of our guided reading groups. They do a great job!

Thursday was a very TACKY day! We all dressed up “tacky” to go along with all the Tacky The Penguin stories. We then created our own “Tacky”. We learned that “tacky” means odd, silly, funny, crazy, different, etc…We also did a story map of the book Tacky the Penguin.  After the kids got done making their “Tacky Penguin” they worked on a ‘Tacky Pack”. This worked on patterning, vocabulary, compare &contrast, beginning/middle/end, math facts, and writing about self esteem. Here’s a look at our Tacky group of kids and penguins!

 

Aren’t they cute?

Celebrating a Hero

We don’t have school on Monday because of teacher inservice but we also will be observing Martin Luther King Day. We spent Friday afternoon learning about this hero from our past and all that he did to help us all be treated with respect and fairness. The understanding of how people were once treated was a shocked to the kids. I certainly saw a lot of compassion for others when we read stories about Martin Luther King and his childhood. We made these Martin Luther King posters to help us remember what he has done for us and how to continue his “dream”.

   

My Snow Day

After having 2 days off from the snow and cold we came back and did a huge writing project and wrote about their own snow day. They worked hard to put in the story elements of Who? Where? When? What? and How? into their story. We also did a story map together and made a class story to model the writing process of having a beginning, middle, and end to their story. They did a very nice job and continue to get better each time we write. These stories are hanging outside our classroom. Come by and read them!

We also read a lot of snow stories but a favorite that has been around a very long time is My Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats. We then made some snow friends to hang out with our stories. They were really cute!

To go along with our snow theme we made these “snowflakes” and torn snowmen. They were very creative and it got it us ready for the snow!