Out like a lion

We couldn't believe it was actually SPRING when we came back from break! With all the snowpants and boots at the beginning of the week the students were so glad when they only had to carry their coats to specials on Friday.

Here's a quick recap of our week:

Reading:
Our new theme question is: How do our actions affect others? We did a lot of work this week with manners at home. Our vocabulary words were polite and share so we practiced doing those two things a lot!

The inquiry we will be working on is with community helpers. So we wrote a list of community helpers here in Ankeny and each student chose one that they are going to research and write a book about!

Writing:
We started our unit on poetry this week. We read many different poems and the students practiced visualizing the pictures in their heads. For one poem the students did draw a picture of what they saw in our minds as I read the poem to them.  Next week we will be writing animal poetry!

Math:
All week we worked on solving story problems. The students need to know whether a story problem is an addition or subtraction problem, and need to be able to identify the correct sign (+ or -). If they are able to do that I have them also write the number sentence to go with the problem (3+2=5).
On Friday they made their own egg story problems.

Science:
We have been talking about the food groups. We learned about the grains, meat/beans, and vegetable groups this week. When you are eating dinner you could ask your child which foods belong to which group!

Have a wonderful weekend!

St. Patrick's Day

Since I knew that we'd be gone during St. Patrick's Day I wanted to incorporate some leprechaun fun into our week before Spring Break.

 

In math we did pots o' gold addition problems. You can easily do your own story problems at home with your child's toys! Encourage them to do both addition and subtraction.

 

 

 

Our Lead21 theme for the past month has been living things. We have talked about how plants and animals grow and change, and how they are alike and different from one another. For this activity students chose an animal or a plant and drew it's life cycle.

Tadpole, Kindergartner, kid, teenager :)

Cactus-- Seed, some spikes, some more spikes, grown up cactus

 One of the table jobs that students did was to label and draw the parts of a flower, and then inside they wrote about what each part did.

Make seeds, carry water, give food, hold flowers in place

 During our writing time we wrote about how we could catch a leprechaun (story sequence), what we would do if we actually caught the leprechaun, and things that made us feel lucky.

I feel lucky when my friend gave me a dollar and some pies!

I feel lucky when my dad brings home a donut.
 

 To wrap up our unit on plants and animals we read the book The Lorax. After reading we discussed the parts of the story (author, setting, characters, problems and solutions).
The students then wrote about what they would do to help the Earth of they were the Lorax. I put these adorable pictures of them with their Lorax mustaches on the bottoms of each piece of writing.
Enjoy!

 

 

 

 

 

Playing Catch-up!

I'd like to apologize for the no show of posts for a while! I am going to try to get back into Friday posts so that you know what is happening in our classrooms throughout the week.

Math-

This week we did some work with clocks and telling time to the hour. We read The Grouchy Ladybug and watched some Harry's Kindergarten video clips to practice matching our clocks to their time. We also played time memory where the students had to match an analog and digital clock.

I have been adding in some money math games to help with students who are not yet able to identify their coins. We also have a couple of games that work on the value of money and adding money.

Reading-

We have been working on using the beginning, middle, and end of stories to retell a story that we know. When you read a book at home with your child have them practice this skill. They are all really good at the beginning and ending, but need to keep working on that middle piece.

Writing-

Our purpose with writing this week was to use descriptive language to create a picture in our readers mind. We wrote about pineapple all week! On Wednesday I brought in a real pineapple and the students described the outside of the pineapple. On Thursday we tasted fresh pineapple, and on Friday we tasted dried pineapple. The kids all wrote wonderful books that should have come home on Friday.

Science-

We have been learning about animals. This week we discussed animal coverings (fur, hair, skin, scales) and why animals live in different habitats. We focused on pond and forest since those are the habitats most familiar to students in Iowa.

Extra-

Last week we did Dr. Seuss so I have put in a couple of pictures from that day.

The kids made rhyming hats, used goldfish to make patterns and crafts, and we did a lot of reading of Dr. Seuss books throughout the day. It is always one of my favorite days of the year!

With their hats being so tall it was hard to get a picture with everyone's face!