November 7-15

Our November has been off to a great start! Thank you all for such great conferences! It's so fun to catch up and let you see how hard each of your students have been working at school. We have started talking about Thanksgiving (especially turkeys) this week. We read some funny stories about turkeys disguising themselves so that they won't turn into the Thanksgiving turkey and turkeys that were running away from the farms. Each student then got to make their own colorful turkey that is now displayed out in our hallway for all to see. We've also talked about how many people eat a big meal to celebrate the holiday so we turned out kitchen center into a grocery store. It has been a huge hit so far! Next week we will focus more on things that we are thankful for and the real reason for Thanksgiving.

For our small groups this week, we worked on our letter Dd page, played a new game called "Slap Math", and sorted fruit loop cereal onto colored pipe cleaners (orange fruit loops on orange pipe cleaners. For slap math, each student had a card with a certain number of stickers on it. When I held up a number that matched their amount of stickers, they got to slap the table and keep my card. They really enjoyed that part of the game :)

Our "Science Friday" today was fun as usual. This time the students got to take over the experiment completely. We worked on weighing things and comparing which things weighed more, less, and the same. They each got to pick any one item around the room that they wanted. I then randomly called two students up and they got to compare who had a heavier or lighter object by placing their items in the balance tool. They really enjoyed it and liked that they were the ones doing everything by themselves. I left the balances out at center time so they could continue to experiment.

Next week we will continue on talking about Thanksgiving. We keep reading fun stories and focusing on rhyming words. I love how many of them are catching on to it so quickly. Our new letter next week will be Tt and our new number will be #6. As you saw, book orders were sent home today. There are many great books for Christmas gifts in there. I will also send home Dec. book orders soon as well so that all books will get here by Christmas time. Remember to let me know if you don't want your child to see any of the books when they come in. Thank you all for being such wonderful parents and families. We really enjoy having each of these children in our classroom!