Compare/Contrast

During our CAFÉ mini-lessons this week, one of our main focuses was “Compare and Contrast”. This week we focused on comparing and contrasting things we know. For example, the first day we compared and contrasted dogs and cats. Another lesson, each student paired up with a partner and I passed out two picture cards. They worked together to describe the picture and compare and contrast the two things. After, they shared one thing that was similar (compare) and one that was different (contrast) between their pictures. Next week, we will be focusing on comparing and contrasting within and between texts.

Describing Jack!

Several of our Writing Workshop mini-lessons have focused on adjectives in the past two weeks. This week we took a picture of our new classroom friend Jack and described him using several adjectives and a few verbs as well. I think this lesson could have kept going and going and going! The students showed a lot of excitement having the chance to describe Jack using one word, that they wanted to keep going!

We've Been Elfed!

To finish off our week of celebrating our classroom visitor, Jack the elf. We "Elfed Ourselves" using this website. We then used an elf name generator from this website to change our names to elf names. All we had to do was add the punctuation to the speech bubble (since we have been learning about punctuation during Writer's Workshop) and created a paper elf of ourselves! The class thought it was pretty silly!

Elf Yourself!

Use a smart phone to click on the QR code to watch a video of the students being "Elfed"!

Surfer of the Week--Zachary

Zachary was our Surfer of the Week this week. His mother came in on Thursday to share some of his favorite things. We learned that Zachary loves Purdue basketball and his favorite player is Robbie Hummel. He has several pictures and even a jersey autographed by Robbie. Thanks for sharing with us this week Zachary!

Adventures of Jack...Day 2

On Tuesday, we found Jack swinging from the snowflakes hanging in our room. He was even upside down!

Adventures of Jack...Day 3

On Thursday this week, Jack has been watching the students during Daily 5 and apparently thought it looked fun! When we got to school he was writing a story map for Work on Writing!

A Little Elf--Poem--12/7/2012

We had an elf join our classroom this week, which went perfect with our poem of the week. The poem was about an elf who is hanging ornaments and trying to throw them at us! It is perfect because the elf in our classroom gets himself into some trouble too! =)

 

You Can Count on Me!

We have a new counting board in our classroom to help us keep track of how high we can count. We have a benchmark each nine weeks as to where the student's should be able to count to 25-50-75-100. The goal is to be able to count to 100 by the end of the year. After I listen to each student count on his/her own we place their person under the number section they were able to count to. When they reach 100 they are considered a "Math Magician" and receive a special reward!

Our first group of Math Magicians!

Partner Number Writing

Today we practiced writing our numbers 0-20 using whiteboards with a partner. We've written our numbers individually and whole group several times. The students paired up today, shared one board, marker and eraser. We listened to one of our favorite number writing songs by Dr. Jean and took turns writing our numbers up to ten. After the song was over, we continued writing our numbers past ten all the way up to twenty! At the end of the lesson I had each partner pick his/her favorite written number and circle it and check their numbers with my numbers on the board to ensure all were written correctly. They then showed me their boards before erasing, putting away and going to out first Daily 5 Math choice.

Take a Look!

 

We have a few new strategies posted on our CAFE board. Each week we work on a new strategy and review previous strategies throughout the week. In the beginning the "C" for comprehension part of the board is focused on primarily and the other three areas follow. We will start to work in those other areas more in the second semester learning new strategies to help us become better readers!

 

Our "Writing Goals" board is up and running in our classroom! Everytime I conference with a studentwe discuss his/her focus goal/strategy they are working on to become a better writer. This week, we posted our names under that goal on our writing board. I noticed immediately after posting the students were more accountable to what their focus goal was than when we would just talk about it. They are able to look at the board, see their name and what goal they are working on. We discusseed how after working on a goal for some amount of time and when they are showing progress with that goal, we will move on to another goal. This week, we have already moved a few students who have shown growth in the goal they had been working on and were ready to move to a new goal. I was also impressed to see how well the students remembered what goal they were working on by just posting their name under the strategy.

Elf on the Shelf!

Monday, our elf on the shelf arrived all the way from the North Pole to keep an eye on each of us during the school day. We were excited to see him! He left us a note, a book and we got to name him. After brainstorming several possible names, we voted and decided on the name Jack. Our elf, Jack, left us a note the first day explaining why he was here and how excited he is to be in our classroom! We completed a chart together as a class describing what we have learned about our elf on day one.











On the second day he was in our room, he found a book all about the letter E and read it to some friends he found hanging around our classroom. He left us another note stating he was pretty upset there wasn't a page dedicated to elves, seeing as how it was an E book. We are on the search for a book we think he would love!

Giving Back

During the month of November, Mayflower participated in a canned good food drive to help needy families in our community. Each class brought in donations and the classes with the largest number won a prize. We were very proud of our class, we filled two boxes of food for families in our community!

Gobble Up Word Families!

To celebrate the upcoming holiday of Thanksgiving we made turkeys that gobbled up words we have been studying! To feed the turkey, I read a word and the students had to find that word and feed it (glue it) to the turkey! The words we used were from the "-at" and 
"-ot" word families. By the end of the lesson, the turkey was stuffed full of words, just like we will be on Thanksgiving Day!

Thanksgiving Fun!

When learning about the first Thanksgiving we found a lot of interesting facts about our friends the Pilgrims and the Native Americans. We completed a chart about chores the Pilgrims had to do, chores we have to do at our homes and chores we both have in common. We then wrote a sentence about those chores to go along with our Pilgrim craft.


We also learned a lot about our Native American friends. They taught the Pilgrims a lot of things when they arrived to the New World. We completed a chart together and wrote a sentence describing something they taught the Pilgrims!

Surfer of the Week--Autumn

Autumn was our Surfer of the Week. We enjoyed learning all about Autumn and her family. Her mother came in and showed us pictures from Autumn's baby book and read us a story written by one of their family friends!

Turkey & Reindeer!

This week we performed two poems! We had to perform our poem from last week because we ended up not having school the day before Thanksgiving and were not able to read our poem that day. Below are last week's poem and this week's poem!

 

Parent University--Math

We had our second Parent University tonight. Parents K-5 came to the school tonight, enjoyed a family meal together and broke out into grade specific classrooms. In kindergarten, we talked to the parents first seperate from the students. We showed them all about how we run Daily 5 Math in our rooms. Below is the video we showed them that showcased a few mini-lessons and various activities in each of the three choices.

Make a video - it's fun, easy and free!
www.onetruemedia.com

After the parents session, we went over to the classroom where the students had been working on identifying more and less with numbers up to 20, writing numbers and manipulating with number bonds. It was a great night for both the parents and the students to learn and share together!