Dinner! Book Project

Each week I try to create a project to help the students retell the big book we've studied. This week, our story was Dinner! by Joy Cowley. We created stick puppets and a beatiful backdrop in order to retell the story. First I taught the kids how to used "skinned" crayons to shade large spaces on the paper. They LOVED it (and I think several told me I was a genius for "inventing" it!) The shading crayons are now in a learning center for kids to work with in a variety of ways.

I cut a slit in each child's backdrop where the puppets could slide in.
Once the stick puppet characters were colored, cut, and glued, we were ready to retell!

Each child used their mini-book of the story to read while they told the story using the puppets. I was so proud of our products! Families, make sure to save these for future retellings!

Thank You!

Parents and Friends,

Thank you for all of your support of our classroom! Thanks for being our guest readers and donating items for our "Wish List"! Thanks for sending yummy snacks each day and for helping us practice our reading and writing at home! We are so thankful to have family like you!

We're Goin' on a Shape Hunt!

We introduced the concept of shapes this week in math. We will compare shapes in terms of number of sides and corners and we will work on recognizing shapes in ordinary objects. To kick off our week, we went on a Shape Hunt around our school! We used my class set of clipboards for the first time and the kids were estatic about feeling so grown up! We created a chart to draw the shapes we found around the school.

We discovered that shapes are everywhere!
The kids quickly discovered that shapes even live on the ceiling! My favorite quote of the afternoon: "Miss Bates! I think the office has a jackpot of shapes!"

When we returned to class, we compared data and shared what we had found. The results: most kids found more rectangles than any other shape. *Must be all of those bricks on our school!*

Here's what one student's data recording sheet looked like:

The kids' home assignment was to look for shapes in their homes and around town. Happy Shape Hunting!

Huggles' Breakfast

Our big book for this week was Huggles' Breakfast by Joy Cowley. We took a picture walk and made predictions about the text, noticed concepts about print, hunted for sight words, and finally read our first big book together. The readers did a wonderful job!

We created circle maps (see our class map below) and flow maps to retell the story of Huggles and his silly breakfast. (ask your child!)

The students worked in cooperative groups to sequence the events in the story and create a large flow map. I was SO impressed by their ability to work together! Wow!

Here are our wonderful groups and their final products. They were so very proud! Please check them out this week outside our door in the hallway.

On Friday, we made our own props to retell the story of Huggles' Breakfast. Our paper bag Huggles turned out so cute and the kids loved making him "eat" each type of food as they read their mini-books to one another.

Buckaroo of the Week - Brady

Brady is our star student in K5 this week. : )

Brady's mom came to read to our class as a special treat. The kids LOVED her superhero story and fun stickers. Thanks for coming and making Brady's week extra special!
Brady presented his special poster to his classmates and we displayed in all week in our hallway. We'll add his page to the class big book that grows with each Buckaroo of the Week!

What a special guy!