So much to be thankful for...

I am so incredibly fortunate to have you and your child in my life. My career brings so much purpose to my life and I love what I do every day that I come into the classroom. I hope you all had a very nice, relaxing, and warm Thanksgiving holiday with loved ones!

Harvest Party
Thank you to those of you who were able to come to our Kindergarten Feast on Friday afternoon. I appreciate the times when I can see you! It was a full house and somehow, we were all able to fit into the kindergarten pod. Before our feast, we made these wacky turkey headbands. They were way too adorable; gotta credit these to Pinterest!

Mmm! Lots of fixings.

Aren't we just the cutest? I love my class!

Over the past two weeks, the class learned about the First Thanksgiving and why we celebrate Thanksgiving today. I told the kindergartners that during the Pilgrim's trip on the Mayflower, life was very hard. They was old stale food, no beds, no toilets (the kids couldn't get over that!), and crammed and congested living spaces. When the pilgrims arrived in America, they still faced hardships. There weren't grocery stores or houses you could buy---they had to start from scratch. This led to the discussion of things in our life that we are grateful to have. Yes, toys are great, but I wanted to gear our discussion towards the small, but very meaningful things. Take a look at what they said.

church

Dr. Warner

my stuffed animals and Macy

my class

my house

basketball

everything

my Uncle Erik

teacher Ms. Joachim

the entire world

family

my momma

Our third grade buddies in Mrs. Trabing's class visited our classroom and read us the ABC's of Thanksgiving.

In reading, we read a silly book called Who Will Carve the Turkey This Thanksgiving? It's about different animals attempting to carve the Thanksgiving turkey. 

After we read the book, we went over what each animal did, then wrote our own versions. Some students took characters from the book while others made up their own. They were very creative!

Our reading stations were all Thanksgiving themed.

Reading CVC words (consonant-vowel-consonant)

Word families (words that end in -op, -ot, -ip)

Putting letters in order

Writing sight words and colors

Other Happenings
I started guided reading groups where groups of 3 or 4 students come to my table and read with me. We work on different reading strategies, such as how to solve unknown words.

We use whisper phones while reading independently. Students whisper what they're reading into the phone so they can hear their voice, but it won't distract others next to them. 

We also have googly eye pointers (a Popsicle stick with an eye glued at the end) to help us point to words as we read.

In math, we've been doing a lot of practice in writing and solving addition story problems. We illustrated our own using breakfast foods. It's fun to see what they come up with!

We've also been working on repeating patterns and number writing in our math books.