Letter G

Letter G came to visit us! Mr. Gooey Gum!

Our new sight word is "here".

Holidays Around the World

As you know last week we traveled to Germany and learned about the first Christmas trees. This week we traveled to Mexico, Israel and Greece and learned about the traditions from each country.

In Mexico we read the Legend of the Poinsettia and made these beautiful poinsettias. 

In Israel we learned about Hanukkah and played the dreidel game.

We also made these cute menorahs with our hands.

In Greece we learned about where the first stockings came from. 

We did stocking addition sentences on our fireplaces and we sewed our own stockings to hang in the classroom.

We've also been practicing using our sight words for writing sentences.

And we are working on increasing our stamina with quiet reading time during Daily 4 Reading rotations!

Letter i

We will continue to study the letter i. This week we will be focusing on the long I sound , or "super hero i"! Our new sight word is "this".

Germany Bound!

Annnnnnnnnnd we're off! The students were delighted to receive their airline tickets before entering the room. Once they"boarded the aircraft", they quickly discovered their seats. We went over "safety regulations" for the aircraft and began our ascent to Germany! We used Google Earth to "travel" from our home town all the way across the ocean and landed in Germany. 

We discovered that the idea of having a Christmas tree in our house was a tradition adopted from Germany.

In our "travel logs", we wrote about the activities we enjoyed today. After reading the German originated story, "The Gingerbread Man", we began our own gingerbread books and delighted in a gingerbread cookie!

We were hard at work building words with our new mystery letter "i".  The students studied the letters and discovered they could build many short i words out of these "ornament letters".

Check out this awesome work! It was a great blending activity.

We used our "super reader" glasses to help us practice reading our books.

After reading The Gingerbread Man, we listened to a different version of the story in the form of a song. We discussed the differences and similarities between the two versions. Next, I chose some "lead actors" to act out the story.

"Stop, stop gingerbread man! You look so good, I'm going to eat you up!".

"Run, run as fast as you can! You can't catch me, I'm the gingerbread man!"

Letter i!

Letter D is our mystery letter!

Our new sight words this week are: they/ come .

Fun Run

Great job running today everyone! Thank you to all of the parents who joined us today and helped out. I am already sore! (I shouldn't admit that!)

Letter P!

Music day

Today was a very special day at MATES -music day! Throughout the day the children had the chance to experience a variety of music in different classrooms on campus.

We started our day with percussion - here you see Arianna, Lincoln and Mary playing the drums.

Next we got to listen to some bluegrass on the banjo and mandolin.

Next we saw a ballerina dance to the Nutcracker and lucky us she needed some dance helpers!

Here you see Dominick and Marlaina being her dance statues.

There were also some jazz dancers - including our very own dance teacher!  In this photo Simran and Mary are helping to demonstrate the concept of negative space when dancing.

Here Abby, Blake and Rishi are demonstrating the same concepts.

The last performance of the day - and the one most of the kids said was their favorite - was a mariachi band! Our own Mr. LaGuardia joined them for a song.

Busy Making Words!

This week we got down to business as we finally had our first vowel visit our class! Hooray! We can make words now! Check out some of the fun activities we did with "a". The students learned that "a" is  super hero letter. They learned that "a" is in disguise when it makes the "short a" sound. The letter "a" pretends to be lazy and sit and eat apples all day long. Every time she eats an apple, she says "Ah, Ah, Ah". When she is not in disguise, she gets to say her super power name (long a). Ask your child about these super powers! They will get a kick out of teaching you.

We learned about the "at" family and built many words. We used our iPhones to send "at messages".

Daily 4! During Daily 4, the students get practice working independently and building their reading and writing skills. Take a look at some of the hard work they did today!

Abby used our new sight words "to" and "go" and wrote all of these sentences by herself! She wants to go to Boston, Maine, Hawaii and Mexico! Sounds like a great trip to me.

Arianna got cozy in the book nook while independently reading.

Carine found a special spot in the teacher's chair to read her book.

Dominick is going to take a trip to Mars! We have a future astronaut here.

Stella built more "at" words on the iPad.

Hailey built at words using our smart board.

Letter a video

Our new letter is Nn!

Please bring in a mystery bag for the letter Nn.
Here is the N video.  Enjoy!

Our new sight word is "have".

It's Pumpkin Time!

This week we learned about how pumpkins grow and created our own pumpkin life cycles. 

We read lots of pumpkin books including our favorite -5 Little Pumpkins - which we now know by heart ;)

We used tear art to make the pumpkins in our pumpkin patch.

We painted our own pumpkins by mixing colors of paint and wrote about them using our sight words - I can see and the. 

Check out this awesome artwork and writing!

We used different shapes to design pumpkin faces. 

We did some great phonics activities this week!

We sorted words that start with S, M, R, and T and we tried to sound out the words.

We brainstormed our own words for each letter and drew pictures to match.

To practice our sight words we played a "race to the top" sight word dice game.  Here you see Abby counting and tallying her words to see which is winning!

5 Senses Part 2

We explored our sense of touch and played a game where the students had to reach into a bag and feel for items that were soft, smooth, rough, hard and furry. Then we glued the items on the words to match.

Our final sense and probably our favorite was taste!!!

We had a taste test in Room 2 today and the students tasted foods that were sour, sweet, bitter and salty. As you can see from the pictures there were some mixed reviews!

Here you see Mikey and Melissa tasting some sour lemon. 

Here you see Blake tasting the same sour lemon!

Then we wrote about things we like to taste in our Five Senses books.

It was a fun filled week of senses!