Snow stories and a mini author study...

This week we read two books written by Jan Brett. The Mitten and The Hat were perfect books to look for patterns and to use to compare and contrast story events. We enjoyed creating the silly hedgehog in The Hat who wore a sock on his head, and we made and wrote about hats of our own. The Mitten is a familiar story to our class, and they loved hearing about the animals who tried to fit inside a mitten. 

Some other favorite snowmen books included Snowmen at Night - we used our imaginations to write about what our snowmen might do if they could come alive. Snowmen All Year helped us think about different seasons and the weather. We used marshmallows to paint these snowmen...

Some of us worked on decomposing numbers with buttons on snowmen...

 


We looked over all of our photos from the Science Alive visit last Friday and wrote about our favorite animal....ask your child to tell you about the sloth, alligator, python, African frog, or the chinchilla! We loved them all!

We worked on a new coping skill called size of the problem. I often observe that our students have a huge reaction to a small problem. We are beginning to look at what the problem is and using this chart to decide how to match our reaction to the size of the problem. This is a hard concept, and we will use this chart a lot over the next few weeks to work on this. We talked about how most problems are really only a "tiny glitch" or a "little problem". They are short problems, easy to solve and don't involve danger. We don't need to scream or cry - we can solve them. 

Looking ahead...next week we'll learn about penguins! 

On Wednesday February 1, we will join Loon Lake and many other schools in the Global School Play Day. We will be working, but on this special day, your child may bring in one favorite toy to use during our Center Time. 

On Tuesday February 14 we will celebrate Valentine's Day in our classroom. We will make our valentines mailboxes at school. Children are encouraged to bring 15 valentines for classmates. They should sign their cards with their own names so that their classmates know who each card is from. However, it is easiest to pass them out if the DO NOT WRITE A CLASSMATE'S NAME on the outside of the card. For that reason, I am not sending a list of names. Just have your child bring his cards, and he/she will put one in each classmate's mailbox bag. We would love any donations for our party of juice, valentine's day plates or snacks such as fruit, cheese, crackers, yogurt etc... (no nut products please)