Happy Thanksgiving!

I am so grateful to have my life's passion and work fulfilled so beautifully.  Thank you all for your support and the honor of working with your children! 

Math
We continue to work on our counting by 5s and practicing ways we use it in our daily lives.  We have enjoyed playing with clocks and practicing how to read the time (knowing how to count by 5s is so helpful!!).  We will move on from our focus on time but will keep a telling time activity as part of our morning calendar routine to keep us practicing (we will also revisit it again!).  We have also begun counting groups of nickels to see how much cents we have.  We will now move on to counting other coins and doing more work with money (along with our continued practice of addition).  Although, before we can do this, I do believe Mistress Wonka is scheduled for a visit, oh boy!

Language
We continue our work with baby vowels and word families.  Look for a change in spelling practice this week!

We all did a check in with sight words and it was so fun for the kids to see how many words they have learned to read since we started focusing on learning sight words!  They have learned so many and grown so much!  Everyone contines to grow stronger reading skills everyday.  I know all the support and practice they get at home has helped them grow and be successful! 


Kennedy Creek
What a wonderful trip!  The kids were so excited to see the salmon in the creek and observe their spawning behavior.  We were so lucky to see so many salmon displaying different parts of the spawning process...from fighting over a female to decomposing and adding nutrients to the soil.

Searching for salmon

Theme
We have left the country!  After careful packing (only the ten most important things we will need for our trip), preparing our passports and getting our tickets, we were finally ready to say, "Buen viaje!"  Most of our time in Ecuador will be spent exploring the incredible Galapagos Islands.  We took an exploratory "tour" last week and saw some interesting and unique animals that can only be found on these islands.  We took lots of pictures and samples to bring back to the ship to study further.  We will create a guide book of the animals we find, so look forward to seeing these as we learn more about the fauna of the Galapagos.

Ready to board! 

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend!  We spent some time last week thinking of everything that we are thankful for in our lives...here are a few examples...

Be sure to check out our Thankful tree in our classroom!

Apples, Salmon and Orcras, Oh My!

It has been such a beautiful Autumn!  One of the many things that I appreciate during this time of year is the sweet music of the children singing our Autumn songs.  We have been singing twice a week with our younger friends and helping them learn the words.  We are now also singing once a week with our older friends.  Plan on hearing a concert of our favorite songs in December!

Math

We continue our work with addition facts, adding three or four numbers, or adding double digits through games and practice sheets.  Block It is a fun game that involves giving the pattern blocks value. Each time a block is added, the child gets to add up the value of all the blocks that it is touching.  Getting the biggest number possible is the goal, so it is fun to use some strategy.

 Block It

We have also begun working with counting by 5s.  We have been counting our number of days of school by 5s, passing our little pumpkin in our circle and counting by 5s as fast as we can, and playing games like the Swiper game.  To play, a child puts out all the cards from 5 to 100 in order by 5s.  Another child swipes a card but moves the other cards together so there isn't a hole giving away the missing card. The other child (who wasn't looking) needs to figure out what card was taken. 

 5s Swiper Game

We are now playing with recording and adding multiply groups of 5.  It has been fun to step into the world of multiplication!  We have played Tic-Tac-Toe with a Twist and Circles and Stars. Both give us experience in counting by 5s to solve multiplying situations.  For example, for 3x5 a child will think/say that it is three groups of 5 so 5, 10, 15...15 is the answer!

This week, now that we can all count by 5s so well, we will begin looking at the clock and learning how to read the time. Learning to read the clock takes time and lots of practice.  Having a analog clock at home or a watch is a great way to get more practice.   FUN!

Literacy
We continue with our study of baby vowels with "u" being our focus this week.  We are becoming pros at word sorts and learning other games to help us read and spell word families.  This week we learned "Shake a Sound" which involves shaking a carton that determines a rime (12 options, for example, _unk, _ump, _ock...) and the child then uses their sound board of beginning consonants and blends to determines what onset will create a word.

Joann (John's mom) has been a wonderful helper on Mondays during our literacy centers.  She is currently running a center that helps the children work with word families and changing beginning or ending sounds to great new words.  Thank you so much for your help, Joann!

I hope you have been enjoying the word sort practice at home as well as the beginning of our spelling!  The "Blind Sort" is a fun way to practice and learn the spelling patterns we are focusing on in class. For the time being, our spelling list will continue to focus on sight words or high frequency words.

In Writing Workshop, we are all making sure to put spaces between our words,  We have begun building our writing tool kits to help us with our writing.  First tool, a "Space Girl/Boy" who helps remind us to put nice space between our words (they need some space!!).  The kids have really enjoyed using the tool.  I love it when they use it and pull it out for writing times even when it's not Writing Workshop!

Word Sorts

Theme
We are wrapping up our time in Washington.  After learning that our state fruit is the apple, we just had to have an apple feast!  I gathered up as many different varieties of apples I could find and we enjoyed a taste-testing session of the different varieties.  Yum!

Washington Apple Tasting 

Living in the Puget Sound, a look at Washington would not be complete without a closer look at salmon and Orcas.  We have learned about the life cycle of the salmon (everyone was especially drawn to the little alevin with their big "yolk" bellies) and the 4 C's salmon must have to survive.  See if your child remembers them (clean water, cool water, clear water, and consistent water). 

We had to know a bit about Orcas because who knows, we might see a pod as we travel out the Puget Sound and into the Pacific Ocean!  We are prepared with I.D. cards and a bit of knowledge, thanks to our friends at Killer Whale Tales.

We are leaving for Ecuador THIS week!!

Art
We are enjoying the colors autumn brings us and have been incorporating them into our artwork.  Check out our beautiful fall leaves we created with oil pastels.


Field Trips and Special Guests
At the end of October, we were invited to dig up all the potatoes in the garden for donation to the food bank.  Wow!  It was like digging for treasure!  The kids had so much fun finding big potatoes, small, potatoes, and every other shaped potato.  Yay, potatoes!

Potatoes!

Last week, I invited Killer Whale Tales for a visit to share their work and study of the resident Orca pods.  I was sad to miss out that day, but I have enjoyed hearing all about it from the kids.  I hope they shared it all with you, too!

47 Days of School!

Theme
Our studies of Washington state would not be complete without a unit on salmon!  We've had lots of fun learning about the life cycle of salmon, even though many of us felt pretty sad about the fact that baby salmon (otherwise known as alevin) never get to meet their parents.  We created life cycle games, used puppets to demonstrate the life cycle and acted out the life cycle pretending we were salmon!  It was hard work swimming upstream, especially since we were no longer eating!  Perhaps if asked your child will give you a special performance! This coming week we will be creating some salmon inspired art and will actually get the opportunity to see spawning salmon first hand on our field trip to kennedy creek on Friday!

On Thursday, we had a fellow come from Killer Whale Tales to teach us all about Orcas!  Jeff was AMAZING (he completely captivated all three classes for a total of 2 hours!)!  We learned about the work he does and about the Resident Pods that live in the Puget Sound.  Did you know that Orcas spend their lives living with their moms?  Or that the resident Orcas only eat Chinook Salmon?  Be sure to ask your child what he or she remembers from the presentation!  Jeff is conducting research about things we do at home that can make a difference in helping the Orcas.  He left surveys for each family to fill out as best they can.  When returned each child will receive more Orca trading cards! (5 extra cards for each child that returns their survey and if everyone returns their survey each child will get 10 extra trading cards!!!!)  Please return these as soon as possible!  After the Orca presentation we practiced following step by step instructions to draw our own Orcas!  Be sure to check these out by the door!

Math
Our current studies are focusing on counting, developing number sense, and even place value for some.  This week we've been comparing numbers and putting them in order from least to most.  We learned a game called compare that can be played at home...remember the card game War?  It's very similar, but with a new name and without the competition piece of collecting your opponents cards!  This can be played with a regular set of cards minus the face cards.  Each player turns over a card and the player with the larger card says ME!  After each round cards are placed in a discard pile.  Play continues until all cards are used.  For the next round the player with the smaller card says ME!  This helps in the recognition of numbers and also in grouping images together in our mind as we count the pictures on the card.  For students ready for a SUPER CHALLENGE turn over 2 cards and read them together as a 2 digit number.  Have fun!

Language Arts
Writing Workshop continues as a time looked forward to!  Everyone is growing as a writer!  For some that means now writing their own name...for others it means incorporating simple sight words...for others it means sounding out the beginning and ending sounds of the words they are writing...and for others it means starting to incorporate long vowel patterns into their writing!  In phonics groups some continue to focus on the beginning consonant sounds, others on beginning digraphs like sh, ch and th and others on beginning blends.  If you would like to know specifically what your child is working on please feel free to ask!  We are playing alphabet BINGO again, but this time we are given a word and we have to look for the letter it starts with!  If you are inspired check out a BINGO game and try this version at home!  We have also begun reading groups!  Everyone now has at least 2 books that they can read!  Perhaps you might like to have your child read to you some morning?!  Thank you so much parent volunteers!