Winter

Hello Everyone!

My first week back was hectic to say the least, but Monday always seems to find a way to rear its pretty head around doesn't it?

I thought it'd be fun to have a winter-themed second trimester with my kiddos. We've been working really hard learning various things as they pertain to winter. I never realized how hard it would be to give students an experience before labeling when it comes to learning about winter in Southern California - it doesn't snow! For Petey's sake, I'm looking out my window right now and it's a ripe 75 degrees.

Today's blog post will be a bit literacy heavy, but I decided that the focus for my first year of teaching would be literacy a long time ago. For starters, I put up our November interactive story about our Donorschoose project that got funded last year. Our December story is a little overdue but we will write about our Gingerbread party that we had on the last day before the break.

I also took down our wonderful fall mural and posted our new winter mural. We already started adding some winter facts last week and I can't wait to see the finished product! Prep for the mural includes two long rolls of butcher paper, paint, and some creativity :).

Read alouds all week included books related to snow. We then summarized how to make a snowman whole group (of course I snuck in our sight words where I could) and it was a great way to introduce sequencing using the words first, next, then, and finally. We wrote and illustrated a How to Make a Snowman story for our cupboard.

Finally, our Make-a-Book for the week was I Can Make a Snowman reviewing our previous sight words.

It was so awesome seeing some of my students sounding out the letters in the word 'stack' and blending the sounds together. Great teaching moment. Below are some student samples. Looks like some of my students forgot we don't scribble scrabble! :P

Have a great week and as always, thanks for reading!