Pancakes and pajamas!!!

We were pretty excited to come to school in our pajamas today! We felt a little wild and crazy when we went to the computer lab in them!

Our pancake breakfast was a lot of fun - it was yummy eating with our friends!

We had fun opening gifts too - always exciting!!!

I wish you all a wonderful winter break! I know you will all enjoy this time at home with your families - I am wishing you all happiness and peace for the new year. I will look forward to seeing your children in 2016!!! 

Visitors and new students!

Last Friday we had a lovely visit from Mrs. Bianco.  She is the Executive Director of the Foundation for Excellence. This wonderful group has awarded our programs several mini-grants that supported our field trips to the Outdoor Center and the bowling alley. Mrs. Bianco brought a fun book to read us all about a crocodile named Lyle. We sent thank you letters to the Foundation after our field trip in November and they loved them. Mrs. Bianco wanted to come and meet our class! 

We have continued to work on our science unit about animals in winter. We have learned that some animals hibernate, some animals migrate and some animals get ready for winter by storing food to eat. We have worked on pages for a book about animals. Some of our pages have been really tricky and we need to watch the directions carefully and tackle the task one step at a time. We will complete our science books next week and send them home. 

This week we also welcomed a new student to our classroom, making us a group of 11! 

We had a lot of fun acting out our famous "Soup Opera" today! Ask your child to tell you all about it! 

 Here is a picture from a previous "Soup Opera" day. 

We reviewed all of our coping skills this week - these would be great to practice over the winter break. Remember, problems are wonderful opportunities for practicing coping skills. You can front load your child with coping skill options prior to a participating in an activity or event that might be challenging. The more your child practices, the better they will become at problem solving. The coping skills we reviewed  included  breathing, counting, taking a break, yoga, ignoring, moving on, expressing our feelings, stop/think/choose, how big is the problem, get adult help, squeeze/rub/rub and using the coping skill tool box.  

Our Holiday Breakfast is next Tuesday morning. You may send your children to school hungry that day! We will have pancakes, sausage, juice and fruit. This is our treat to our students. It is also PAJAMA DAY - so your child is welcome to wear their pajamas that day too! 

I will take plenty of photos to post on the blog! 

Science Alive!!!

We began our week with a wonderful visit from Science Alive! Several really interesting animals came right into our classroom. We were able to learn about them, get up close to them, and even touch them! We loved it!

This armadillo curled up into a ball...

 This toad was very large...

 A snake was a very heavy reptile...

 

A baby sloth was very hungry and furry...

 Having animals in our classroom was a perfect lead in to our next science unit...we will be reading and learning all about animals in winter. This week we will learn how bears hibernate in winter, and how beavers get ready and store food for the winter.

We welcomed a new classmate on Wednesday. It was a fun start with a scarf song and rhythm sticks during music therapy.

Gingerbread Week!

Winter is Here!!!

The weather is colder now, so we have been practicing getting our winter clothes on and off. We are trying to stand our boots neatly in the hallway on our boot racks and we hang our coats up on our coat hooks. Getting ready for recess takes practice - you can help your child at home by practicing putting on coats and boots, zipping, etc. These skills help your child become more independent. Your child might want to bring a few extra pairs of socks to keep at school - sometimes feet get wet at recess.  Wet snow pants often get packed up in backpacks at the end of the day - please check your child's backpack and make sure the snow pants are dried out and ready for the next day. 

This week we worked on some special art activities to go along with "gingerbread boy" stories. We read "The Gingerbread Man", "The Gingerbread Cowboy", "The Gingerbread Girl",  "The Gingerbread Baby" and "Gingerbread Friends" and then we made gingerbread houses of our own!! We will display our creations here and send them home before winter break. 

In our social skills lessons this week, we learned and practiced two coping skills - "count to ten" and "express your feelings". Counting helps us slow down and calm down when we have strong feelings. We practiced counting slowly - some kids even count by tens.  When we express our feelings we need to use calm words to tell people how we feel and what we need. This is especially hard to do when we feel really angry or frustrated. A good coping skill combo would be counting or deep breathing and using our words. 

We have all become readers and we are building our reading stamina by quietly reading books from our reading pouches and our book boxes. The children really enjoy this and are able to read books quietly for a good chunk of time - you might like to have your children spend a few minutes with books at home too. Good readers become great thinkers! 

We had an assembly on Thursday afternoon to recognize our Loon Lake Leaders of the month for the November trait of kindness. Here is our LL Leader of the month for November...

Our new Loon Lake trait for December is resiliency...we will be incorporating that trait into many of our lessons this month. 

And we had another exciting award Thursday evening. Our own Mrs. Couveau was honored with a Golden Apple Award at the Board of Education meeting! 

A week of kindness....

On Monday, we had a guest who told us all about her former student.  This boy is now in the army, stationed overseas. We decided that it would be kind of us to write him letters in case he was feeling homesick. We are working hard to do a great job on our letters and pictures. 

On Tuesday, Miss Qonja visited our classroom to read a book about feedback. We talked about how feedback helps us change and get better at things. We like to say, "Listening to feedback plus making a change equals a good day!" Accepting feedback is an important part of having a growth mindset - real learning and change happens when we can calmly accept feedback. We wrote about feedback in our journals. 

On Wednesday we all went to our Loon Lake Team time in other classrooms to learn more about kindness. We also had music with Miss Marlowe - everyone did a great job using the rhythm sticks!

All week long we worked on the coping skill "How Big is the Problem". We learned that our reaction needs to match the size of the problem. Most problems are small - they can be easily fixed in a very short time. A medium sized problem can be fixed, but might take more time and work. We refer to big problems as problems that involve an ambulance, someone getting hurt and/or take a very long time to fix.  We often find that our students have a reaction that is very big and it does not match the size of the problem, so this is a great coping skill to practice. 

Although the weather has been wonderful, it most likely will cool down soon. Please remember that we go outside for recess and your child will need a warm coat, hat and gloves/mittens to wear outside. They should bring these every day. It is helpful to have names inside hats and gloves. 

We earned many feathers for our headbands this week, including feathers for hallway behavior, group, following directions, being safe and being neat. We have a few more to earn next week. We feel very proud of our feathers - they were hard to earn! We also read several Native American legends from woodland Indian tribes, and created art work to go with them. We read a great book called, "The Legend of the Loon" and a Cinderella story called, "The Rough Faced Girl". 

Loon Lake is collecting non-perishable food for our canned food drive - your child might enjoy bringing in a can of food for this. 

I would like to wish all of you an early Happy Thanksgiving. I hope you all have a wonderful holiday with family and good food! I am so thankful that I am able to work with so many wonderful children and families - I love being in room 113 with your children!