Foggy Bottom (Ms. Purdin’s cat) wanted to wish you a happy and safe snow tomorrow (Wednesday)! I know she doesn’t look too happy in this picture…I think it’s because I awoke her from her cat nap! If you start to get stir crazy, Foggy came up with a few ideas to help you pass the time! We like to do lists. 🙂
1. PLAY OUTSIDE IN THE SNOW! I bet you can do some really fun things with all that snow outside!
2. Practice counting to 100! By 10s!
3. Work on your 100th Day Project!
4. Curl up with some cocoa and good book! Snow day snuggles are the best.
Hope everyone is shoveled out and ready for this next BIG storm coming this week! Did I jinx us by sending out the 100th Day project information on Friday??🙂 LOL I will talk with Mrs. Peever tomorrow, but I think the plan will be to keep our 100th Day celebration on Friday, February 6 (even if it really is the 99th day.)
I promised to post some examples of the 100th Day Project. I realized as I went looking for them today, I had a hard drive crash between the last time I did this project and now, so I don’t have a ton of pictures. However, I do have a link to the post about this project from 2012. Hope that is helpful!
We had a smooth transition back into our school routines. We are practicing and modeling safe and kind behaviors, even when things don’t go our way, or when things are difficult. I have introduced a “Quiet Area” into the classroom, where children can go to get a little space if they are feeling sad or frustrated. At this point in the year, children should be able to count and recognize numbers to 20, be practicing rote counting to 100 and know their beginning sounds (including short vowel sounds). We practice these skills everyday, but practice at home or in the car is strongly encouraged! Also, we have been working on a bunch of new sight words such as:
see
look
am
like
that
On Friday afternoon, we did some STEM work (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) with toothpicks and marshmallows. You could have heard a pin drop in my room as the children were creating their structures. I saw children collaborate on ideas, as well as try to figure out how to make their structures stand on their own. After the children finished, we had a “museum walk” and children walked around to look at each other’s work. When the class came back together, everyone got a compliment from someone else on what they liked about their work. Powerful stuff!
The children’s toothpick and marshmallow creations.
Thanks for all you do! I appreciate all the Valentine craft materials that have been sent in!
Happy 2015! It’s hard to believe it’s actually the “Back to the Future” year! A movie that defined my childhood and my love for Michael J. Fox to this day. And all three movies happened to be on TV on New Year’s Day…
Which gave me the idea for this post. As Doc Brown tells Marty at the end of the first movie, “where we’re going, we don’t need roads” and that kind of reminded me of starting back to school tomorrow.
Sure we have certain roads we must follow (like the Common Core State Standards), but our year together is far from over and we have a lot more places to go that we haven’t imagined yet.
I retooled our classroom over vacation, got rid of the “penny banks” and am replacing it with something much cooler (and less labor intensive for Ms. Purdin to keep organized), and made an electronic version of my plan book, something I’ve wanted to do for a long time.
So let’s have a happy new year! January is going to be fun – we will be doing lots of thematic learning around bears and hibernation. Next week we have a puppet show coming to us called, “A Long Winter’s Nap.”
Here’s two cool things I found over vacation:
1. Good Things or Gratitude Jar for 2015. I started one myself. Great idea to do with the family.
And ICYMI: Taylor Swift’s Christmas Gift Giving Video is awesome. Since I have a Human Services background, I’m very interested in service learning. If anyone has ideas for how some Kindergartners could give back in and around Nahant shoot me an email. 🙂
