Hello, Bluebird Families!
We had another great week learning and playing together! On Monday, we learned about glaciers and made our own from white playdough and moved them across maps. We also used the large abacus that usually lives in the front hallway to explore the many different number combinations that make 10. On Tuesday, we noticed that the mountains were missing when we looked out our classroom windows. The fog was hiding them! We read a book called Hide and Seek Fog and also created our own foggy pictures, using stretched out cotton balls for the fog over our drawings. We reviewed telling time to the hour and learned how to tell time to the half hour. I was very impressed! The half hour was too confusing to them earlier this year, so we decided to just focus on our o’clocks. However, this time they understood the half hour concept so quickly! On Wednesday, we enjoyed music time with Marci and celebrated the 100th day of school! We read 100 Ways to Get to 100 and compared blocks that show place value for 1, 10, 100, 1,000. We each counted out and ate 100 pieces of popcorn for a special snack. We worked together to put number tiles in order from 1 to 100! We also made 100 dots in groups of 5, so we could count to 100 by 5’s. The children liked this, because it is so much quicker than counting by 1’s! On Thursday, we read The Penny Pot, which tells the story of a girl at a fair that doesn’t have enough money to get her face painted. The painter tells the girl to wait and watch the penny pot, because soon their will be enough money to add to her own to pay for her face painting. Throughout the story we got to practice our money counting skills to see how much more money she needed. We also made valentine bags to collect our valentines in the next day. The children enjoyed decorating their bags however they wanted. On Friday, we celebrated Friendship Day/Valentine’s Day. We read several books about friendship: Little Bear’s Friend, Best Friends, That’s What Friends Are For, and How Do You Hug a Porcupine? We also made heart string art and had a scavenger hunt for compliments. We discussed the meanings of the compliments I hid in our room and how I see these amazing charcteristics in my sweet students every day! I wish you could have seen their faces light up over this fun and meaningful activity! You can see the compliments we found, which are now on our bulletin board in our classroom!
Looking forward to another great week and welcoming a new friend to our class!
Anna
