Week 14: Making Books

Short and funny week this week, with the PD Day on Friday and Mr. McCullough away on Thursday afternoon.  Still, here's what we managed to get done.

Books We Read
Press Here (again, since we would be using it this week)
Lisa & The Snowman
A Silly Snow Day

Weekly Centres
Writing
We practiced our letter "M" on chalkboards, on the ground, in the air and with crayons and pencils.

Patterns
Using the items we found last week on our fall nature hunt, we created repeating patterns using leaves, pine cones, small rocks, sticks and wood chips, and then glued them to pattern strips on the wall.

Press Here Bookmaking
With the help of our reading buddies, we created our own, six page "Press Here" books, using action words like shake, tilt, blow, press, push, rub and tap.  We used red, yellow, green and blue stickers and some special shiny bug and jewel stickers for the last page.

Other Things We Did
We built words that started with a "MA" sound, like man, mat, mad, and a few others.
We hung up our Only In Fall, Only In Winter drawings so they could rotate like a mobile.
We read a few of our own Press Here books and practiced all the different actions.
We talked about "found patterns" in the classroom.
Mr. Hanson showed us a Charlie and Lola story on his Smartboard.

Week 13: Only In The Winter

Books We Read
Snow Story
Snow Sports
Time To Sleep
Press Here

Song of the Week
Douglas Mountain

Snows are a falling on Douglas Mountain,
Snows are a falling so deep!
Snows are a falling on Douglas Mountain,
Putting all the bears to sleep.
Putting all the bears to sleep.

Trimming the wicks on Douglas Mountain,
Shining up the chimney so bright!
Trimming the wicks on Douglas Mountain,
So we can bring the night!
So we can bring the night!

Centres
November Portfolio
Students spelled their own name, using the letters they have learned so far, and created a picture of their choosing.  They then explained the picture to the teacher, who wrote a description underneath.

Patterns

We created growing and shrinking patterns using rocks of various shapes and sizes.

Art
We flipped our cardstock paper over and created a scene of something we could only do in the winter.

Science
We experimented with ice cubes, seeing how long cubes took to melt in the water and out of the water.  We also tried to sink various containers with ice cubes.

Building Blocks
It was our free centre for the week, though many students kept with the winter theme when building.

Other Things We Did
We talked about clues that tell us that winter is coming
We came up with activities and events that could only happen in the winter.
We role played winter sports using the book Winter Sports.
We talked about the difference between growing, shrinking and repeating patterns.
We built more words on the carpet, adding the letter "D" to our mix of R, N, A, C, T and S.
We gathered the last items of fall we could find outside and will be using these items to create repeating patterns next week.
We talked about hibernation and learned that fat (in the form of lard) can help insulate animals from the cold (which we replicated using ice cubes)
We had our first lockdown practice of the year.  Everybody did a really good job of hiding and being quiet so we could have a nice, safe class.