We LOVE Valentine's Day!

We had a fun week celebrating Valentine's Day with lots of activities about love, hearts, Hershey Kisses, and candy conversation hearts!  Our poem of the week was "I Love You More Than."  We learned the word "than" and found it a lot of times in the poem.

During class writing time, we wrote sentences about love.  The kids had a good time coming up with these fun sentences!

We had a lot of fun at centers this week!  Here are a few highlights:

 Stamping word wall words

 Matching numbers and ten frames

Stamping beginning sounds

Playing short vowel word lotto

Building mystery word wall words

Measuring hearts with candy hearts

Matching equations with teen numbers 

Addition stamping

Valentine word writing around the room

Sorting real and nonsense words

Adding numbers and covering up the answers with Hershey Kisses

Writing about the people we love

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During math time, we talked more about the partners of ten and played a game with candy hearts where we had to find the missing partner of ten, (like we did with the marshmallows last week).  This time around, we also added recording our number sentences.  The kids had a good time with this game!

We also played a game on our own where we rolled a number, marked it in a ten frame, and found the missing partner of ten.

We did some Valentine's addition.

And we had a fun data and graphing activity this week!  We taste tested Hugs and Kisses and voted for our favorite.

The kids enjoyed every minute of it!

Here were our results. Six people liked kisses, 19 people liked hugs.

We met for a a math meeting at the carpet and put our results into some ten frames and discussed which side was greater and which side was less.

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During writing time this week, we took a candy heart and turned into something new to write about.  Evelyn made a cheetah.

Ivory made a baby with a binkie.

Brecken made a bear.  They turned out great and the kids had fun ideas.

We also made some large Hershey Kisses and wrote about if we like hugs or kisses from our families the best and why.  These will be in their end of year portfolios!

We also did a quick lesson and review on plural nouns.  We sorted animals into barns that were singular or plural. 

Then we made a class big book where one side had only one of everything and the other side had more than one of everything.

Their favorite part was sharing their work with the class!

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Hannah was our star student this week and had fun showing us her baby brother who made her laugh.

She also had a birthday this week!

Avery will be having her birthday while we are off-track, so we celebrated her birthday too. Happy 6th birthday girls!

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Friday was the big day!  The day of the Valentine's party and the kids were just a little excited.  We started off the day decorating bags to hold our valentines.

The kids used all sorts of hearts, stickers, and googly eyes to make fun creations!

Our party was a great success!  Thank you to all of the moms and dads who came in and helped or sent items in for the party.  I appreciate all that you do to help with these events!  The kids got to decorate heart-shaped sugar cookies, make a love bug craft, play a cupid's arrow game, and play a candy heart toss game.  Here are some pictures!

After we were done with the rotations for the party, we lined up our Valentine's bags and then passed out our valentines for each other.

The kids all went home with a huge bag full of goodies and had a great last day on track.  

See you all in March...and get ready to celebrate the 100th day of school when we get back!  :)

"Snow" Much Fun and Winter Clothes

We had more snowy fun and learning during this last week of January!  I think we will all be happy when it is warm again and everyone stops getting sick!  We have had 4-6 kids absent every day for the last week or so and it has been so empty without everyone there.

This week, we started learning about story maps.  We talked about who the characters in a story are, what the setting is, and how to identify the beginning, middle, and end of the story.  This is something we will continue to work on for the rest of the year.  We started with the book, "There Was a Cold Lady Who Swallowed Some Snow."  The cold lady swallows lots of different things, then hiccups and a snowman appears!

We made our own mini-books of the story during center time.

And hunted for the objects the cold lady swallowed around the room and recorded them.

Here are some of the fun snow-themed centers we did:

Our finished shaving cream snowmen

Practicing positional words in a book about penguins

Reading short vowel words on snowmen cards

Making shape snowflakes

Finding words that started with M like "mitten"

Sorting words that rhymed with snow

Melting snowflakes with addition facts

 

Sorting snowballs with words that had th, sh, ch, and wh

Building word family snowmen

 

Ice fishing for math facts

And matching mittens that had pictures and the ch, sh, th, and wh sounds

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In math this week, we worked more on teen numbers.  We played a matching game with partners and matched teen numbers to their equations.  (12 is the same as 10+2, etc.)

The kids are getting very good at automatically knowing what 10+ a number is!

We also practiced adding ten to numbers and raced our animals to the end of our teen number board.

We started to break 10 into partners.  We used a 10 frame and marshmallows to play a game with a friend.  One person hid their eyes while the other hid some marshmallows under a cup.  Then they opened their eyes and had to use the ten frame to figure out how many marshmallows were missing.  It was a great math exercise for them!

We also built number sense snowmen.  The kids had to match ten frames, tally marks, and equations to each snowman to build them.

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In literacy, we learned a new word family, the "-en" family.  The kids have gotten so good at seeing word family chunks in words!  This was a fun word family for our class because there were lots of friends with the -en sound at the end of their name!

We also hunted for the -en sound and wrote our own words.

We learned our last digraph, "wh."  We used a wheelbarrow to collect piles of dirt that had words that started with "wh" on them. 

We designed our own mittens and wrote describing words and sentences about them during writing time.

We also read a book called "The Jacket I Wear in the Snow" and drew a picture of ourselves in our snow clothes.  We listed all the things we wear in the snow.

On Friday, we talked a little about Groundhog's Day and made a fun craft to go with it.  We listened to this video to learn more about groundhogs and also enjoyed the groundhog song while we were working:

We made a guess about whether we thought the groundhog would see his shadow or not.  It looks like our class got it right!

Aiden was our star student this week and he had fun showing us a plate his mom made when she was in kindergarten!

Ivory and Madison won student of the month for showing the trait of honesty!

They each got a certificate, some prizes, and popcorn!  Here they are with our Principal, Mr. Hansen, taking a fun photo!  Good job girls!