Wednesday, December 17

WORDLESS WEDNESDAY

THANK YOU to all of the volunteers that either sent in treats, came in to help or both! The kiddos loved EVERY minute of this activity! Their smiles were priceless!

Tuesday, December 16

We are off to a busy start again this week! The excitement is in the air! I have received many additions to our gingerbread supply today! Thank you so much! We will be starting that at 10:30 tomorrow morning. If you are coming to help and you want to arrive a little early, come on in. Please check in at the office so that we are aware of all of the helpers in the building. Today, Gordon Fredrickson came in again to share his story of a Farm Country Christmas Eve. The students love to listen to Gordy read to them and tell them what it was like "back when."

Ask your child where the saying copy cat came from! They thought that was really funny. Have a great evening!

Friday, December 12

Wow! I cannot believe how fast time is flying! We are moving very fast this week and In know that next week will go even faster! We are busy decking the halls here at school and increasing our brain strength at the same time! We worked hard on place value all week and today we introduced adding decade numbers together. We also started working on adding one or ten to a number and what that does to a stick-and-circle drawing. This is a tricky concept and we will continue to work on it next week and throughout the year. We finished up our elves and they are hanging above our lockers. If you have time, come take a peek! The doodle trees are also being finished.

In reading we really worked hard on s blend words, high frequency words and how pictures and captions help us in a story. Blends can be tricky to write so we really worked on sounding out each sound as we wrote the words this week. Thanks for all the work you do at home to help with this!

We started putting our parent presents together today and the kiddos are really excited to share their hard work with you next week. We also made some glitter trees (I can't get enough glitter at this time of the year ;))!

Please make sure to check the updates for the pages to see what we will be working on. Also, on Wednesday we will be making gingerbread houses at 10:30 am in our classroom. On Thursday we will be making sugar cookies (rolling, cutting, decorating, baking, packing). If you plan on coming to either one of these events, please let me know so I can let the office know how many people will be coming. There are a lot of illnesses going around so stay healthy this weekend! 

Friday, December 5

This week has flown by!! We have been so busy getting back into the swing after a long break and we are all very excited by the holidays that are coming right around the corner! We worked really hard all week on 10's and 1's in math and making numbers using ten-sticks and ones-circles. We also started using the make a 10 strategy where kids try to borrow from one number partner to make a ten and find the extra ones! Big concept for little people! In reading we focused hard on l blends, story sequence and categorizing and defining words. One thing that I did for the first time this year was to play Candy Land. Like I told my kiddos, we only play when we make our brains work hard. I would write a word (high-frequency, l blend, review sound, etc.) on the white board. If they read it right, they could draw a card to make a move. It is a great, easy way to incorporate academics into something fun.

We also had an all school morning meeting today!

We finished our day by starting our holiday elf project. We will be finishing them throughout the week next week. Have a great weekend and be sure to check the pages to see the updates for next week!

Tuesday, November 25

So the last day and a half have been spent finishing our Thanksgiving projects and getting our classroom and hallways ready for Christmas! We also finished up Unit 3 in math and pretested Unit 4. Our brains have been busy following directions and getting creative!

We also spent some time working on iXL and XtraMath the last two days. We are working hard on typing in our usernames and passwords for all of the apps that we will be using on a consistent basis.

Please remember to check out the pages section to see the updates for math and reading for next week. Also, over the long weekend, take some time to read to your child and listen to him/her read to you. Our skills are growing and we are making some big gains! Have a restful and happy Thanksgiving!

Friday, November 21

Today we had an excellent performance by the CLIMB theater about being respectful to everyone and everything. It talked about how to treat our friends and the Earth. It was great!

We finished our Turkeys on Strike this week as well. Here is a quick picture of them. Some of you may have seen them outside of our classroom yesterday. We will be finishing up on last project on Monday and then we will start on our Christmas decor! Can't believe it is already that time!

Have a great weekend and remember to check the pages for the updates on what we will be working on. We will be assessing High Frequency words during reading on Monday so we won't be introducing any new reading concepts next week. I have updated already for the following week though!

Thursday, November 20

Today was the concert day! Wahoo! Everyone was so excited all day to make it to 2:10 for our program! What a great job singing everyone did! Have a great night!

Friday, November 14

THANK YOU!!! It was so great getting to see everyone at conferences again these past two weeks. I love to share what your child is doing in class and the progress that is being made with you. These kiddos work so hard each and everyday. It is a real joy to celebrate in their success! Today was a busy brain testing day but we did start out with our favorite greeting, the shoe greeting. We also did a new activity called coconut rock, paper, scissors. They had a lot of fun acting out the objects! After that, it was off to tiger time.
When we got back we worked on subtraction story problems using numbers and using nickels and pennies. Everyone is really getting the hang of this! Way to go! Then we took our spelling and vocabulary tests. After this we headed down to read with our kindergarten reading buddies.

Yesterday we worked on our thankful pilgrims and today we stared working on our turkeys that are on strike! They are trying to get you to eat something other then them! We have things like apple pie, brownies, chicken (because it tastes like turkey!) and many other things! So fun to see their creative, persuasive writing! There will be pictures next week as we finish the project up!
Remember to check out the pages updates to see what we are working on this upcoming week. And if you have a minute, say a cheer for my niece as she swims for Lakeville North in tonights state swim meet!

Monday, November 10

So sorry about the post on Friday not showing up until today! I clicked on save instead of publish! Lesson learned I guess! We had a busy Monday today. We worked hard on finding missing totals and partners and we took our first quiz on these ideas. The students got to use their iPads during math this morning and we worked on Xtra Math. This was so fun to watch them use this technology and they are really getting the hang of finding the apps that we are using. We did talk a lot about how they need to use the app Mrs. Voigt is saying and that we will have time for play later. If you can reinforce this concept at home it would be much appreciated! In reading we started working on the digraph -ck. The students made lists of words that end in -ck. We also worked on our new high frequency words for this week. Please continue to read each night for at least 10 minutes. This really helps to build their reading abilities! Have a warm night and be safe on the roads!

Friday, November 7

Today we started with our monthly all school morning meeting. Some of the actors for the high school came over to sing Be Our Guest from Beauty and the Beast for us. The kiddos loved it. They will be performing the play on the weekend of November 22nd. 

This afternoon we "baked" up some synonym rolls. We were all very inspired chefs with some delicious cinnamon rolls!

 

We also took some time to work on the iPads. We started using Core 5 on our iPads so they really enjoyed working around the room on this! Please check out the pages to see the updates for this coming week!