Week 14: Only in Winter

Books We Read
Press Here
Tap the Magic Tree
Malke's Secret Recipe
Snowy Sports: Ready, Set, Go!
Snowball

Weekly Centres
Letter L
We worked on the second hardest letter to print in the whole universe, the letter L.  We didn't really find it that hard, but maybe some people do.

Dress the Snowman
Mr. McCullough gave us a piece of paper with three stacked circles on it.  It was our job to dress the circles to make a snowman.  Using googly eyes, pipe cleaner, tissue and construction paper, white glue and glue sticks, we gave our snowmen eyes, noses, mouths, hats, arms, legs and, for a couple, dresses!

Only in Winter
Using the other side of our "Only in Fall" picture, we created Only in Winter pictures.  We talked about things we could only do in the winter and drew a picture of that activity.  Mr. McCullough then strung a ribbon through the top and created fall/winter mobiles in the room!

Other Things We Did
We incorporated Chanukkah into our daily math, answering questions like how many candles were on the menorah and how many have been lit so far.

We created "Hand Menorahs".  We chose our coloured construction paper, then a colour for our hands.  Mr. McCullough painted our hands, and then we planted them on the paper.  We added lights to the menorahs on our own!  We also solved pattern mysteries where we had to figure out how to get two attributes (hand colour and paper colour) to match to continue our pattern.

After reading Press Here a second time, we figured out action words in the book.  Words like press, rub, tap, shake and blow!  Tap the Magic Tree also taught us other action words!  We'll be using these words when we create our own Press Here books with our Reading Buddies.

We talked about authors and how they write different books with different characters.  Mme. Degroot taught us that the author of the Charlie and Lola books had written other books, and we looked for the similarities between the two.  Mr. McCullough read Snowball, which was written by Lois Elhert, who had also written Leaf Man.  We looked at both books for similarities and differences.

This also led to some talk about how books can remind us of other books.