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!"