News for December 11

News for December 11

The big news this week was the first snow! A tradition in my class is to watch the short movie, "Frosty the Snowman", where the first snowfall is a magical one.

The students finished writing their magnet man stories this week by printing a good copy on very long paper. Each child then rolled up the paper into a cylinder and held it closed with a paper clip. Then magnet man could hold on to his story by grabbing the metal paper clip. Next the students worked in pairs to create movies starring their characters. They are responsible for the set and props, titles, credits, music, the problem and the solution and of course the acting!

The students did some word games using their knowledge of letter sounds. They managed to turn a hen into a fox and a cat into a pig, just by changing one letter at a time.

In math, the class continued the geometry unit. This week we looked at angles, parallel lines, shapes that are congruent and sorting figures by one attribute (for example, shapes that have a right angle). The students also worked in pairs to create as many different shapes from 4 right angle triangles as they could figure out.

The whole school is participating in our annual "Holiday Post Office". The students reviewed the standard way to write a letter and started writing letters to other teachers and students in the school. The children also learned how to fold their letters into an origami evergreen tree.

We looked at a couple of "mix and match" books this week and combined that art technique with what we know about nouns, adjectives and verbs. The students did the artwork to create two different "mix and match" class books.

On Friday, we learned about the Jewish celebration of Hanukkah. The students learned how to play the game of dreidel and enjoyed eating chocolate "gelt" (money) and homemade mini jelly donuts.

In computers, the children cut virtual snowflakes using the following website:

http://www.addictinggames.com/createasnowflake.html