Wonderful Winter Fun!

January is traditionally my favourite time in grade one! The children are much more focused and interested in learning. We are focusing on Jan Brett's story of "The Mitten". It is such a beautifully illustrated story! The children are writing little reports about each of the animals in the mitten. 

In Science, we created "Winter Wish" bottles! In the bottles, we placed water, glitter, beads, sparkly plastic stones, white plastic snow and baby oil. Then we hot glued the lid on the top and then covered the lid with blue duct tape. The children loved shaking the bottles and watching the oil and water separate and the glitter mixed into the bubbles! So wonderful to watch! 

Believe it or not, I have a pet hedgehog. Her name is Tumbleweed. She is very cute to look at, but has a great big attitude in a little body! She is very funny and stamps her little feet when she is mad. 

She is very hard to take photos of! 

My son gave me this wonderful stuff for Christmas (he was actually thinking of my students)

It was wonderful, my son and I played with it for 2 hours on Christmas day! 

It is called Kinetic Sand. 

My kids LOVE it! 

I made two centre activities with it. One is making words in the sand and the other is straight PLAY! 

(something that is often forgotten in grade one, but I believe children learn best through playing!) 

We have started estimating! I fill the jar with different things and the children place their best guess on a yellow sticky note and then we actually count the items together as a class group. The child with the closest guess, wins all the items in the jar. Some children choose to share the items with the entire class and other children choose to keep the items all for themselves! It is their choice and I do not force them to share. 

We have started working on winter centre activities that relate to vowels, syllables, rhyming, real words and silly words, beginning sounds, medial sounds and ending sounds. So many skills that my kids need to practise! They are working very hard on these activities and are making progress! 

I love how focused they all are! 

I found this wonderful little kit containing theraputty and snowman parts! It was called a Melting snowman kit! I choose a child to build the snowman each day and then over the course of the day, he "melts"! It is so amazing to first graders! 

February promises to be full of even MORE learning and fun!