Cute Projects!

We have been busy! As part of our Building things unit, we built little puppy dog houses for our word puppies! We covered the houses with sight words, because after all they are for WORD puppies! They are super cute! 

Also upping the "cuteness" factor, we "ELFED" ourselves! So we then wrote about being elves and we even found out our elf name! SO funny! We all laughed and laughed at our funny names!

More fun projects will be coming soon! 

It's been a while!

Hi! Sorry I haven't been updating my blog that often, basically because I had a wicked cold! It really kicked me in the butt! I haven't had a cold that bad in years! Anyway, I'm on the mend now and feeling much better! So I have a few updates to the blog to share! 

We LOVE science!! 

We made Elephant Toothpaste! 

It felt so neat! It was warm and the bubbles were very soft! 

PUPPY PALOOZA!

We got a letter from Santa asking us to help him to teach these WORD puppies how to read and behave like good puppies should. we were so excited! Each of the puppies is a different breed. 

Having the puppies in our room sparked some wonderful writing projects! 

We used words to describe the puppy we are taking care of.

Not sure why these pictures wont turn the right way!! But the writing the kids did was wonderful! I was proud of their efforts! 

Snow DUDES!

We painted Snow dudes! We did such an amazing job! 

We also framed them with snowball shapes all around the edges. 

Then we added a scarf made of construction paper. 

I love how unique they all are! 

Sight word Skeletons and more!

This was Halloween week! We had a field trip tucked in there to the local public library to visit with a author and illustrator. We also had lots of guest teachers because our administrators were out of the building for three whole days! Plus it was a full moon! 
Believe it or not, my class was actually wonderful on the day of the party! I was expecting them to be overly excited and loud, but they were just perfectly lovely! 
In the morning we worked on a reading adaptation of Brown bear, brown bear, but I changed it to Green witch, green witch what do you see?  There were blanks for the kids to fill in the missing parts of the book, mostly sight words and colours. The children picked up on the pattern quickly! I saw some good, focused workers!

When they finished they had to come and read it to me! 

We have a child sized skeleton puzzle in our free choice area. These boys discovered how to put it together and then decided to compare their bodies to the skeleton to figure out where their bones were! It was neat to watch them! 

Earlier in the week we worked on our number printing and counting skills, with a haunted house project and some spooky stickers! It was LOTS of fun! 

First we had to outline the house shape with a white crayon so the house looked extra spooky, then we chose our stickers. We were only allowed to choose 10 stickers total, but they could be in ANY combination. We chose from bats, ghosts, cats and pumpkins. 

                  

There were so many skills in this ONE activity! There was fine motor, because they had to peel the back off of the stickers! There was counting, reading and printing! ALOT! 

Sight word SKELETONS! 

This was a fun activity AND it practised sight words! The children first had to cut out their skeleton's parts and then add in his eyeballs and any other details they wanted. Then they needed to build the skeleton by putting him/her together with paper fasteners. Then they had to write the sight words they are working on,  on the skeleton's bones! 

 

They turned out so adorable! And the kids were so excited that I let them take them home! 

Here is a little skeleton "diving" out of a chair pocket! I thought it looked so funny! 

Bats are beautiful!!

We have been focusing on BATS this month. 

We started by making our own baby bat and by reading the old favourite, Stellaluna by Janell Cannon. After sharing the story, we made our little baby bats from little black socks from the dollar store! They are adorable. The children were so in love with their babies! I had them give their baby a hug and then leave them on the art table so I could hang them up after school. It was really hard for some of them! They kept asking when can we take them home? I said on Halloween, they will want to go home with you! 

We also LOVE Vowel Bat! Both the song on Youtube and our classroom puppet bat! 

These are the little vowel bats I made so we could sing my own version of a vowel bat song. 

My bat song, follows the old favourite song, 5 little ducks!

"Five little bats went out to play over the hills 

and far away! 

When Mamma bat called,

"A, A,A ,A"

Only little A bat came flying back!" 

Then you keep singing the same verse but with different vowels and those little bats come back! 

I hand out the little bat sticks to my students and they fly around the room and then back when they are called.

To end the song I have all the little bats fly away again and the mamma bat calls all her little vowel bats back! A, E I, O U!  

They LOVE this song! and it helps them to develop their understanding of the short sound of the vowels!

So busy!

I have a very busy little bunch this year and I love it! 

This year I made literacy kits for my kids. If their families wanted one they just let me know and I would send one home. 

This is what I include: a mini-white board and marker, a shaped magnetic white board, a hand-made game called Fry Frenzy, a sight words board game with little Lego dudes as the game markers and an alphabet paper with all the letters and sounds listed, oh yes and a levelled reader. I also include a letter to the families describing all the games and materials and what they can do with all the items in the bag. Here is a photo of the contents of the bags. 

We have been learning about the Fall season. We read a story called Leaf Man and we created Leaf pictures from the leaves we collected in the school yard. 

I had the children write a sentence about their leaf picture. This child wrote: "See the leaves." I see a leaf dancer." 

So cute!

"See the leaves." "I see a kid."

They were all so unique! 

This month we are learning about Bats! This is a personal favourite of mine! I love doing this theme unit of study. I use it for covering some science and language arts. 

So we made Vowel Bat pointers to go with the Vowel Bat song on You tube and our Vowel bat book! 

SO much more to share! I will need to take more pictures! 

What a busy week!

We are working on patterns! So we have 10 different centre activities to work through with our centre partner. 

Pattern blocks is a favorite! 

Pattern caterpillars

Milk lids! 

Unifix cubes

Foam shape pattern kits

Play dough and number stamps

Paper shape patterns

Look at the cool pattern I made!

We made leaf creations!

We printed a sentence about the leaf creation we made.

We experimented with colour mixing and created circles that we turned into little birds!

They are so adorable! 

We are in the midst of our colour unit, so we tye dyed t-shirts! It was super fun! We used squirt bottles to squirt the dye onto the shirts! That made it even more fun! 

We adopted a tree in our school yard. We are going to watch this tree over the school year to see it change. This will help us with our science unit on seasonal changes.

We noticed a little ladybug in the arm of the tree. We decided that means our tree is lucky! 

These are the leaves on our tree in September. 

This is the bark of our tree in September.

We studied the letter O and made octopus hats! They look so cute!