Holidays Around the World

Pack your bags and get your passports ready-it's the holidays! The children have had so much fun working on our social studies unit centered on culture and the holidays. We started off studying Kwanzaa and talking about it's similarities to other holidays.
Then we made passports, created luggage and headed off on Thompson Airlines. We check in with the airline, head over to our seats to color our maps of our destination, buckle our seat belts and put our tray tables in the upright position and take off! When we land we check in at the customs desk with our passport. There we practice the local language by saying Merry Christmas in the native tongue. Then our tour guide picks us up at our hotel and takes us over a local museum or cultural center to learn about that countries tradition.
Our first stop was Italy where we learned about the Legend of Old Befana. We wrote about the story and created mini Befanas.
The next day we headed to Germany where we learned that Christmas trees originated from there. We created paper Christmas trees and also did some German paper cutting.
Today we went to Mexico where we learned of the Legend of Poinsettia and then made a poinsettia from butcher paper. Countries left on our world tour: Sweden, England and France. We will also be learning about Hanukkah.
Next week we will take turns in each first grade classroom learning more about Holidays Around the World!

A Few More Yoga Pics...

Yoga and Yogurt with your Yogis

Today was our last day of yoga. The children have really enjoyed participating in this movement class. It was fun watching them come up with their own poses at our last session. It was great having so many parents participate today-no small feat in work attire! We enjoyed our healthy yogurt snack afterwards (slightly less healthy with sprinkles involved, but hey it was a celebration!).

Lost Teeth!

These are the kiddos that lost teeth in November. No one has lost teeth so far in December!

Scientist of the Week

This morning we had our first scientist of the week! Each week on Wednesday, we will send home our Scientist Tool Kit with a different child from the class. All of the information needed about this project is inside the kit. The experiment will be performed the following Tuesday.
Today we had chalk soaked in vinegar to see what happened. The hypothesis was that it would dissolve which turned out to be partially true. We are leaving this experiment in our science center for further observation. Great job!

Native American Centers

What better way to spend our short week before Thanksgiving than engaging in some fun learning activities with our 6th grade buddies. We worked on our countdown to Thanksgiving plates,we played several Native American games like jump the snake,and hiding the rock in our mocassins. We made totem poles and teepee's with Native American symbols. The best part of all was sampling Native American fry bread made fresh in the classroom (the kids REALLY liked it).

T'was the Night Before Thanksgiving...

We had wonderful turn out for our Thanksgiving feast! I was pleased to see that all of us could fit in the classroom together, even if we had to eat somewhat picnic style. The children did a fabulous job of our reenactment of the book T'was the Night Before Thanksgiving The children had a great time making props and practicing. I think their facial expressions were the best. Each time we practiced they wanted to add more and more details-all of them took their roles very seriously! I still haven't forgotten about that video!

Dinoland...

A couple of pics from the Dinoland field trip. A few weeks later we were working on a book as a thank you-the children feverishly discussed which was their favorite part of the trip-clearly the had a great time!

Halloween Centers

Halloween was a blast! We loved wearing our costumes to school and our centers were definitely a success. We had a very fun hay ride in the middle of the day, and enjoyed several Halloween stories. Face painting was awesome, and the children loved playing the games and making the snacks. Thank you so much to all of my fabulous volunteers who either donated items or helped run the centers that day! Lots of pictures!

Slimey Buddies

We created slime with our 6th grade buddies. Lots of giggling and oohs and ahs were heard throughout the room. We love reading and working with our buddies. They help us read our books, play math games with us, and now science. The slime was a hit this Halloween season!

Our Pumpkin Patch

Thank you so much for partcipating in our family pumpkin project. The carved pumpkins really had us pumped up to come to school. We loved looking at the different carvings. I could see each child's personality coming through their designs! We toured our pumpkin patch, read by pumpkin light on Thursday in the classroom, and took them into the hall on Friday to display for the school as well as light them up. We participated in a 1st grade hallway GRAB time. We were surprised at how many pumpkin seeds we found in our pumpkins, and loved tasting all the roasted pumpkin seeds. These photos have us posing by our carved pumpkins. Great job!