close ups

I just wanted to add a few close ups of these amaryllis paintings, we have gotten so many compliments on them! Stop by to see them in person!

if you look closely, you can see some of the descriptive words in the background

Telling Time

We've had great fun learning about telling time to the hour and half hour too. The clock museum has been hugely popular with the kids! We've been sketching clocks in our math journals and playing lots of fun clock games this week.

This was taken on Thursday...I stopped in Friday at the end of the day and more clocks had shown up too
so fun!

A few photos from the week...

I just had time to snap some shots of some of our finished products this week...

Set up and ready to plant our paperwhite bulbs

Add caption

This is the bottom of the Amaryllis bulb, we learned how the roots help
to anchor the plant and also soak up nutrients from the soil

Our paperwhite roots will be visible through the small pebbles as they grow.
Just waiting for the sun and water to "wake up" the roots.

Mrs. B works in our classroom and she wrote this lovely poem, one line at a time to tell the story of the
birds that have visited the feeders outside our window. 

Drew and his family brought a bird feeder to us! We love to see the birds that are visiting.
Still waiting for a cardinal...

Amaryllis Paintings

We made observations by thinking about...what we notice, what we are wondering about, and how we feel when we look at the Amaryllis. It was great to see the children so full of excitement and wonder...

We were busy painting all week long

artwork by Seth

artwork by Mallory

Beautiful

A busy week...

Listening to the book "Diary of a Spider"

Filling in the numbers on our wooden 100 board

Good work boys!

Alex is busy using our new base ten magnet set

January Newsletter

Greene Gazette

January 2016                             c.greene@hwschools.net

Happy New Year! Language Arts: Our literacy hour consists of time in our small groups for guided reading, working in stations including a science/sketching station, listening to books on cd and drawing a response to the story, magnetic trick word station, and working in our reading journals to create written responses to picture book read aloud to the children. Children continue to learn about and notice the features of fiction and nonfiction texts as we study a variety of topics. Bookmaking: The two-day workshop I atteneded with Martha Horn was a wonderful refresher on how to help children to bring bookmaking to the next level. We will be shifting our bookmaking focus to learn how to use our own words to tell our own stories which will become our books. Children have mostly been creating books that retell other books they have read, or nonfiction factual books, and also fictional stories showing their own creative nature. Learning to make books that tell our own stories will help the children create narrative stories. I will be modeling and guiding children through this process by sharing my own oral stories and turning them into books. This will also allow us to focus on how to create detailed drawings to support our stories. Fundations: Unit 6 Adding suffix “s” to a baseword. The children are adding suffix “s” to words with familiar spelling patterns and reviewing rules of digraphs, bonus letters, and glued sounds (am, an, all) to make words such as socks, chips, balls, pans, puffs.

Math: We have been working with place value and comparing two digit numbers in a variety of ways while also becoming more familiar with the patterns found on a 100 chart. We contiue with using our math journals for problem solving activities. The end of January we shift our focus to learning about clocks and telling time to the hour and half hour! We will be asking for examples of small clocks you have at home for our clock museum! Stay tunned.

Science: This month we will be growing paperwhite bulbs and of course talking and writing about what we see, what we notice, and what we are wondering about as we observe their growth in the comings weeks. This is a fun and interesting way to extend our planting study into the winter months and brighten our classroom with the beautiful tiny star like flowers! We will also focus on the winter weather we notice this month as we learn about words to describe outside temperatures and the types of precipitation we see. This is also a fun time to talk about how animals adapt to the winter months, where they live, and how they stay warm and find food. We have already had juncos and chickadees visit our new bird feeders right outside our windows! Mrs. Greene also found some great mini stamps of different animal tracks that we can study. Sincerely, Mrs. Greene

Staying Warm on Breezy Days

Tyler is all bundled and ready for the elements!

Literacy Time Center Work

Santino and Luca enjoying a joke book

Seth hard at work on his reading response drawing

Making Sense of the 100 Chart

We have been busy finding number patterns within the 100 chart as we explore concepts of even and odd, tens and ones place, skip counting by 2's 5's 10's while understanding what is happening when we are skip counting, also working with comparing and ordering 2 digit numbers. The children enjoyed working with partners to roll a dice to get to 100 while using base ten blocks and a sorting mat to show the number values from 0-100. We also color coded a 100 chart and then turned it into a puzzle. We used our knowledge of the number patterns within the 100 chart to put our puzzles back together. The children loved this. We will be working to identify numbers that are ten more and ten less than a given number as we continue to explore numbers up to 120.

Amaryllis Amazement

The children run into the classroom each morning, so excited to check on the progress of our Amaryllis bulb. It's been a delight to watch the buds burst open and see the bright red flowers emerge before our eyes!

Monet getting up close

The petals were sparkling with glitter in the morning sun!

setting up for our oil pastel drawings

there are five flower buds inside each larger bud!

happy artists

Adding observations into our science journals