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!