More November News

Here's an update for the past few weeks.  November is such a short month.  It kind of got a way from me.

We celebrated a few birthdays.  Henry and Isabel both had birthdays this month.

We also learned a lot about Native Americans and enjoyed a lot of fun activities having to do with Native Americans.  We made a Native American and wrote about what our names would be if we were Native Americans.  Here's what they look liked:

We made our own butter and cooked pumpkin bread in the crock pot.  Boy, was it ever delicious!!  After this, we wrote the recipe for how to make butter!  While were were shaking the butter, we danced around to some of our favorite songs to help the time go faster!

For our Native American celebration, we made headbands and vests to wear.  On Native American day, we weaved placemats, made tepees, hunted and fished, and made corn bread muffins.  In the afternoon we feasted on corn bread muffins and popcorn.  We also enjoyed a couple of movies that showed us what life was like on the Mayflower.

We also talked about how the Pilgrims made quilts to keep them warm.  We talked about patterns as well and we all made a block with a pattern to add to a class quilt.

December will also be another busy month with lots of fun activities!  We will be making gingerbread houses, learning about reindeer and caribou, doing some Santa science experiments, and we wrote letters to Santa persuading him to send us an elf on the shelf for our classroom!!  Stay tuned....

Crazy November

We crammed a lot into this week!!  I think we learned a lot and had a lot of fun at the same time!  We are learning a lot about Native Americans.  Some of us are still trying to make the connection that they are the same as Indians.  We read a couple of books by Tomie DePoala - The Legend of the Bluebonnet and The Legend of the Indian Paintbrush.  We also read a little article about Native American Powows and watched a little you tube video of one.  We made a project for the big bulletin board in the hallway based on The Legend of the Indian Paintbrush.  We drew some Native American words/symbols on a piece of buckskin (aka brown paper bag) and then outlined them with chalk.  They turned out great!!

We also made some ten turkeys.  We are working on learning the sums of 10 so we incorporated a little Thanksgiving in with our learning and made the cute turkeys!!  

If you didn't know this, we spend some time dancing in our classroom!!  We do this to get the wiggles out and get our brains ready to learn!!  Here are a few that we are dancing to this month:

A little Holiday fun!!

A few math songs

some reading songs

And some just plain fun songs!!

I am looking forward to meeting with you at parent teacher conferences.  Hopefully you received your child's report card on Friday with your conference note.  I have a couple of technology things that we are doing in class that you can be doing at home.  I can't wait to show you some of the apps we are using too!!

I hope that you have receive the note about parent pick up changes!!  Please note that this is for your child's safety and the safety of everyone!!  Starting next Monday, November 18th, if your child gets picked up, you will find them in the elementary lunch room.  I am no longer going to have students waiting at the office for you to pick them up.  ALL of my pick up students will be walked to the lunchroom by me.  Thanks for your support on this!!

Happy Halloween!!

We had fun in math this week with some patterning.  Some of us even wore our shirts with patterns!  Here's a look at what we did.

We had a great time at our Halloween Party!  I loved all the costumes!!  We were stuck inside all day because of the rain, but we survived!!  Here is a glimpse at what we looked like:

The scary costumes!

The critter costumes!

The super hero costumes!

The princess costumes!

The career costumes!

The cute costumes!

The whole gang!

Now that it's November, we will be learning all about the Native Americans and Pilgrims who started the holiday we call Thanksgiving.  We will also be learning about Veteran's Day!

Have we been busy!!!

I am finding it really hard to find time (remember) to update this every week!!  There is so much happening right now in our classroom!  We have been celebrating birthdays, having fun Friday, taking tests, learning new apps.  I could go on and on!!!

Here are a few highlites from the past few weeks:

We finished our first unit of study in Reader's Workshop and were able to invite a guest reader into our classroom to read to us.  We also wrote a reading compact that we all signed.

Mrs. Huttenga was our guest reader.  She read 'Enemy Pie' to us.  This is one of my favorite books.  Just ask the kids, I have LOTS of favorites!!  Too many good books out there.

This is our Reading Compact that we all signed.  This is hanging under the willow tree so that we can see it everyday.

We enjoyed celebrating Eli and Max's birthdays as well!

                    


For our fun Friday, we did some painting with leaves and sponges.  I think our paintings turned out pretty good.  Oh, did I mention that in the middle of our painting the fire alarm went off?!  Yes, this was pretty exciting.  Mrs. VandePol also donated some Halloween foam crafts.  We hung these on the lockers!!  Thanks Mrs. VandePol!

 

 

 

 

Here are the foam Halloween choices that we got to create for our lockers:

We have some exciting news that we got today too!  We are pen pals with a first grade class in Clare!!!  We received our first email message today and got to see the students and meet the teachers.  We will be sending an email back this week and we have started creating Halloween cards for them!  We can't wait to  be in contact with our friends this year.  Hopefully we can do some skyping with them as well!!