The Gingerbread Man

We officially kicked off our Gingerbread Man unit.  The children are very excited about this unit...how can they not be when it involves building gingerbread houses and performing a special play for all of you?!  Throughout this week (and last Friday), we spent some time reading different versions of the gingerbread man tale.  Next week, we will revisit these tales to work on the skills of comparing and contrasting.  We will also be busy, busy, busy practicing our Gingerbread Baby play. All children brought home their speaking parts for the play.  I encourage you to have your child practice his/her parts for just a couple minutes each day to build his/her confidence for our performance.

Dates to Remember:

• Gingerbread house building on Monday, December 19 beginning at 1:00 (please email me or send a note if you plan to attend)
• Gingerbread Baby play on Wednesday, December 21 at 1:15 
• Pajama Day on Thursday, December 22
• No School on Friday, December 23

This week during Reading Workshop we spent a couple days reviewing buddy reading expectations.  Prior to these lessons, several partnerships were spending most of their time figuring out who was going to read first and what they were going to read, so they were left with little time to actually read. A couple days of mini-lessons helped turn this around!  We also reviewed that readers point and hop under the words as they read.

This week during Writing Workshop we:

• reviewed that writers focus on writing their words before they draw their pictures.
  
• practiced thinking of different patterns about one topic.  I came up with the topic of snow, and the children came up with several different patterns that could be about snow.  This helped show children the range of possible patterns.
• learned to rehearse our pattern prior to writing and to let it sweep us across the pages.  Once we know the pattern, we can write the repeating words across all our pages then go back and fill in the part that changes.
• learned how to write a question and answer pattern book.

This week during Math we:

• practiced solving number stories.
• played Monster Squeeze.
• played a mystery block game during which we focused on different attributes about the blocks (shape, color, size, thickness) to help us determine the mystery block.
• discussed characteristics of triangles and rectangles.
• collected data about our favorite colors then worked together to group our data and create a bar graph to display our data.

This week's snow brought a new level of fun to our playground.  Thank you for sending your child to school with appropriate gear for playing in the snow.

Have a cozy weekend!

Katie