Letter B!

This week our mystery letter is "B" and our sight word is "look".

Penguins!

Oh how we love penguins in Room 2!  This was a fun filled week of penguin learning and even with the short week we fit in some awesome activities!

We read lots of informational books about penguins and labeled their parts.

Don't you love how Blake drew a fish in the penguins belly?

We wrote about the life of a penguin.

We used our newest sight words "where" and "there" to create these great sentences.

We played a fun snowball sight word game and built our sight words with snowballs.

We did lots of penguin math including these adorable paper plate penguins combinations of 5 fish in their bellies.

We made addition sentences using yellow and white penguins by rolling a die to determine how many of each penguin we would use. 

We practiced counting by 10s

We practiced opinion writing in our journals and wrote about why we like penguins.

Kimberly likes penguins because they "slide on their bellies and they can swim good and eat krill" - all amazing facts we learned this week!

Sight Words this Week

This week we did not add a new letter but we did teach two new sight words! We are studying "where" and "there". We discovered so many things about these two words. Some of our observations were:
- "Here" is hiding inside of both of those words!
- Another student observed that both words were the exact same except for the beginning letters of each word.
- We saw an "ere" pattern.

In order to help the words sink into our brains we gave each word some hand movements. Every time we read the word "there", we pointed at something. Every time we read the word "where", we put our hands to our foreheads as if we were searching for something. Try it at home together!

Here is a quick, fun song to help you practice the word "there".

The mitten

This week we celebrated the talented author Jan Brett by reading her beloved stories, The Mitten and The Hat. We did SO many fun activities with these stories; here are just a few! In The Mitten, a boy named Nikki wanted his Baba to sew him some snowy, white mittens. Reluctantly, she agreed even though she warned her grandson that the mittens might get lost in the snow. Sure enough, he loses a mitten and some clever animals decide to climb in and make it their home.

In conjunction with our math lessons this week, we used the characters from The Mitten to write an equation with a combination to 5.

We laced our own mittens and cut out all the animals in the story, "The Mitten" in order to practice retelling the story.

After reading the story once and getting our "retell mittens" ready. We watched Jan Brett read the story as we "acted" out the story with our mittens. You can watch the video here!

Here we are making our animals climb in the mitten!

Those sneaky little animals!

The students were thrilled to use their NEW "big kid" journals. We wrote "opinion" pieces about the snow. Kimberly wrote that she loved the snow because she can make a snowman with "accessories".

Our next Jan Brett book that we studied this week was "The Hat". This is a delightful tale about some silly animals who steal some clothes from a clothing line and they wear the clothes as a hat!

We became fashion designers as we created our own articles of clothing for the clothing line in "The Hat".

After designing our own clothes, the students were ready to take to the "stage" to act out the story.

Look at those beautiful woolens!

Averie made a cute little Hedgie and Mrs. McLean was our first narrator!

Those silly animals all stole the clothes!

More silly animals!

The students came up with their own animals to crawl into the mitten.

January

It's January, and we're off and running with our learning! Is there anything better to do in this blustery weather than curl up with a  good book? Oscar was re-reading the book Snowmen At Night in our book nook during Daily 4!

We got silly with our spiral notebooks today and wrote sentences by including  as many sight words as we could in one sentence! 

We got some great sight word practice by playing our Snowman Sight Word game! Students strengthened their fine motor muscles by placing a "snowball" on the correct sight word.

Check out these adorable resolutions!

Averie wants to read more!

Gotta love playing school at home!!!

How precious is this?

Great ambitions Blake!

Welcome Back Review

As we get back into the swing of things, we are reviewing all of our letter sounds and sight words that we have learned. Here are two videos we sang along to help us practice. The sight word song includes SOME words that we have NOT taught, or perhaps won't be focussed on this year, but it's still good practice to introduce. Most of the words on the video are words that they know :)

It's fun to do the moves with the song; it wakes up the brain and adds another dimension to the lesson.

As I mentioned before, some of these words have NOT been taught, but that's ok!!!