The Mitten vs. The Hat

This week we have been working on making connections to stories.  We have used The Mitten and The Hat for the students to connect to.  One thing I am working with the students on is being able to explain why they like something.  I want them to be able to use details about what they like about the story instead of saying "it's funny".  Since the students LOVED both of these books I decided to have the students pick their favorite and write why they liked it.  Here are some of their writing.

 I liked The Mitten book because the bear sneezed.

 I liked The Mitten book because the boy dropped the mitten.

 I liked The Mitten book because the bear sneezed.

"I liked The Hat book because the animals laughed at the hedgehog."

The Biggest, Best Snowman

Today, we read the book The Biggest, Best Snowman by Margery Cuvler.  This book is about a little girl who was told she was too little to do anything.  So with the help of her friends she created the biggest, best snowman.  

We made the biggest, best snowman in our class today.  It felt fitting seeing how it was snowing lightly this morning as we were coming to school.  I had all the pieces ready all we had to do was put the snowman together.  Check out the awesome snowman we made!

 The students give me instructions on what to do first, second, third, etc.  As we made our snowman we wrote down the steps we used to create the snowman.  Here are the steps the students gave.  I wrote all of the words that are in green.  The students used the blue marker to write our word wall words.

Penguins

We have been reading about Penguins in class this week.  We had fun reading and laughing as we read the Tacky the Penguin books.  Today the students were asked to draw a penguin whatever size they wanted.  Then we used the cubes to measure how tall they made their penguin.  The students worked hard and did a great job!

Here the students are working on drawing and coloring their penguins.

The students are learning to measure using cubes.  They know they are suppose to start at the bottom and work their way to the top.  Next, the students will count their cubes and document how many cubes tall their penguin is.

Check out some of the great Penguin measuring the students did!

Later we did some Penguin math where the students made a penguin using construction paper and then we added how many fish the penguin was going to eat by giving our penguin two sets of goldfish.

 

Fairy Tales

The students have enjoyed the Fairy Tale unit.  We have read all the great fairy tales and fables.  Of course, the girls LOVED Cinderella and the boys LOVED The Three Little Pigs and they also enjoyed The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig.  

For Cinderella, the students were asked to think about what they would ask their Fairy Godmother for.  I challenged them to think outside of the norm.  They did a great job!  Here are a few of my favorite.

 When we read the book Jack and the Beanstalk the students were asked to be creative and draw their own Giant self.  Then we used cubes and measured how tall our giants were.  Here is an example of one students giant. 

One of the students favorite books was The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig.  It is a cute book where the roles are reversed from the original book.  The wolves set out to build houses, they build super strong houses but the Big Bad Pig still finds a way to bring the house done.  But the wolves always seem to escape.  But the wolves out-smarted the pig by building a house made of flowers and the Pig enjoyed smelling the house instead of blowing it down.  The students used their imagination and drew a house made of whatever they wanted.  Here are a few of my favorite.
 

Winter Math

The students had fun practicing simple addition problems by adding marshmallows to their hot chocolate mugs.  We practiced a few times before we glued the paper on and wrote our addition problem.

 

One day we read the book The Biggest Snowman Ever by Steven Kroll.  It is the cutest story about two little mouse students who want to make the biggest and best snowman ever, so they decide to work together.  The students were working on sorting things by small, medium, and large.  So we created a book where the students drew all the parts of the snowman big, bigger and biggest.  Then the students drew the biggest snowman they could on a piece of paper.  Here is a great example from one of my students.