Can you believe how much snow we got? In November?!? Only a small portion of the playground was plowed, so students without snow pants had to stay on the plowed area to keep their clothes dry. I have been testing students to see who knows their letter names and sounds and I am very impressed with how well everyone is doing! With our focus on families this week, we read some fun stories about different kinds of families and we talked about how "it takes a village to raise a child." Your child should be able to explain what that phrase means. Please turn in your child's reading minutes tomorrow. I will total everyone's minutes to see who has met our monthly goal of 300 minutes. Those who have met the goal will receive a Pizza Hut coupon.

Be prepared!

Snow will not keep us from going out for recess. Don't forget the snow pants, snow boots, hats and gloves!

This is Aaron’s VIP week! Our theme this week is family. We will add the words mom and dad to our word wall. The letter of the week is G. We’ll be using the interactive whiteboard a lot this week to practice putting numbers in order on a calendar, to learn about probability with an interactive spinner, and to play some literacy games. Students will use the words who, what, when, why and how in their journal writing. In science, we are studying the planets and their positions relative to the earth. As a family, you might enjoy going to NASA’s website to explore our solar system.
http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/profile.cfm?Object=SolarSys

There's no school for the rest of the week. I hope you have a safe holiday. Eat lots of turkey and take many long naps. See you on the 29th!

Plastic Pop Bottles Needed

If you think about it over the Thanksgiving holiday, please save your plastic pop bottles. We are making a special project next week and will need several 2 liter or smaller plastic pop bottles for filling balloons with sand. Okay, I'll tell you, but don't tell your child yet -- it's a secret! We'll be making stress balls. I already have the balloons but haven't purchased the filtered sand yet. Does anyone happen to have any?

It was fun to have snow on the ground today. Students had to learn the two main rules for snow: no throwing snowballs and only get off the paved area if you're wearing snow boots. We played the game, Who Stole the Cookies from the Cookie Jar? I changed the bulletin board outside of our classroom to say "We are thankful for..." Students wrote what they are thankful for onto colored leaves and attached their leaf to the tree in the center of the board.

The little darlings were so good today that they earned another "link in the chain." We're trying out a new system in which students earn a slip of paper (chain link) for good behavior, positive comments from other staff members, and for showing care and compassion with their peers. The chain hangs from the white board. When it reaches the floor, students will earn a reward of their choice (popcorn party, extra recess, movie, special game, ??).

Paper Chains Group Project

Each table worked as a group to build a chain with 30 loops. They had to decide who would be the "counter" and each member of the team cut strips of paper to contribute to the group's chain. Although noisy, they did a great job and really seemed to have fun with the project. I will combine each group's chain to make one really long chain that will hang in the classroom.

Milan also shared some fossils with the class.

We had some visitors this morning from Educator for a Day. They watched the combined classes sign some songs. We are getting really good at Frosty the Snowman and just learned Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer today. I'll mention this again because it may be helpful--you can watch "how-to" videos of both songs on the Rose Park Sign Club blog. Access it either by the link below and to the right or from the Rose Park web site. Yesterday, I started testing students to see if they knew all their letter names and sounds. I was impressed and pleased by the number of students who passed with flying colors. If they did pass, they brought home a paper award. Students learned to put the _ed ending on action words that happened in the past. Students watched a Magic School Bus video about outer space as an introduction to our space unit in science. We will be learning the names and positions of the planets. I told them that we live on the 3rd rock from the sun.

It is Joe P.'s VIP week. He shared powdered donuts with the class at snack time. He also shared his poster of favorite photographs. We learned a difficult concept today--counting by 2s and by 5s. It is something that makes more sense the more it is practiced so please practice with your child at home. We read Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel this afternoon. I stopped reading the book at the point where Mike Mulligan and Mary Ann are in the bottom of the cellar and the town wonders how to get them out. I asked students to brainstorm a way to get them out, which they wrote in their journals. They had some fantastic ideas, including using a conveyor belt, digging a tunnel, and using a giant magnet to pull Mary Ann out. Compared to their ideas, the story was a let down. The solution of the townspeople was to leave Mary Ann there to become the furnace and for Mike to be the janitor of the new building.

We read some fun counting books this morning. One of them was about huge numbers, such as a billion and a trillion. The book said it would take a person 23 days to count to a billion! Students learned about the food pyramid and had several opportunities to put foods into categories. Ms. Kembel sent them home with information about the new food pyramid and a link to a web site where you can find out how much of each type of food you should be eating.

We talked about Veteran's Day briefly and students are bringing home a flyer about a veteran who lost part of his leg in a war and who uses a working dog. Mrs. McSweyn presented the personal safety lesson to students who were allowed to participate. They have a pink sheet in their backpacks explaining what they learned. We played an interactive math game in which I called out a number and students had to get into a group with that many students. If there were not enough students to make a 2nd group, the "extra" students had to sit. They had fun with it, but they got really wound up!

Ms. Kembel taught a great lesson about shapes this morning. Students saw some Native American patterns that used shapes. Each student used pre-cut shapes to create a pattern on a paper quilt square and the pieces were put together to create a class "shape quilt." The class voted to hang it in our classroom. In math, students practiced counting to 16 and 17 and writing numbers 14-17. Our vocabulary words today were average, nutritious, and revolting. Freak your child out by using one of those words and watch them react. I told them to try to freak YOU out, so please let me know if they use one of those words this week by commenting on this blog. We got to see Riley's guinea pig at the very end of the day. So cute!!

In kindergarten sign time, we started learning Frosty the Snowman. If you are interested in learning the song too, or your child wants to practice at home, see the sign club web site under "How-To Videos" (there's a link to the sign club site on the right side of this screen). Students practiced writing numbers 11 and 12 today. Our science lesson was about things you would do or see during the day versus at night. Students made a "foldable" book showing the differences. They also practiced repeating patterns on a sheet of stars by continuing the pattern until they ran out of stars. We read the book Honk! Honk! about geese migrating. Each student made a goose and I hung the whole flock from the ceiling in a V formation. Tonight is Papa John's pizza night. If you order a pizza, be sure to tell them you're from Rose Park.

Today students went to the library for vision screening. We started a new chapter in math. Your child will be learning to recognize and write the numbers 11-31. Our letter of the day was J and we read a poem about taking a journey. During writer's workshop students wrote, "We can go to _____." They had to write the name of a place to which they would take a journey. For social studies, we learned the name of our city and made 2 pages for a book about our place in the world.

Daylight Savings!!!

Don't forget to change your clocks on Saturday night!

Yesterday we started a night unit in science so today we read some books about an animal that hunts at night -- the owl. Students made construction paper owls with movable wings (brass fasteners hold the wings to the body). They are hanging in the hall. Tomorrow we will interactively write a sentence about one of the owl facts we learned today. Did you know that owls eyes are so big that they cannot move them and that is why they turn their heads around so far?

Early out for the rest of the week!

Students earned a reward today so we watched a video of Make Way for Ducklings, which is also our book of the week. In math, students learned about growing patterns. An example of a growing pattern is ABAABAAABAAAAB... Students had to find what grew each time and continue the pattern. They did an amazing job! Students had free choice at writing time. Afterward, everyone got a chance to sit in the author's chair and read their favorite piece of writing to the rest of the class. We tried the math board game again today with much more success -- hardly any fighting. Conferences tomorrow. See listing on the right.

We put 3 new words onto the word wall: big, in, and will. Those words will be in our shared reading pieces this week and are words your child needs to look for when you are reading to them at night. We read Where's the Fly, which introduced the concept of examining where we are on a grander scale: in a school, in a neighborhood, in a city, in a state, in a country, in the world. We also used Google Earth to zoom from outer space to our school. (We also zoomed to some places mentioned in the new Knuffle Bunny book, Knuffle Bunny Free.) Students wanted to to zoom to their own homes, but very few of them knew their home addresses (something to be working on). Students previewed the Book Fair. They found lots of cool books and circled their wishes on a flyer that went home today.