What a busy week we have had as we kicked off our unit of study on Traditions Around the World. We began our "travels" in the Netherlands. We learned that on December 5th, St. Nicholas Day, children fill their klompens (wooden shoes) with hay and carrots as they wait for the arrival of Sinterklaas. Sinterklaas is a kind man, who wears a long red robe and tall hat that comes to a point. He rides on a white horse. The horse eats the hay and carrots from the children's shoes and in return Sinterklass fills their shoes with treats. We are very excited and hopeful that Sinterklass will be paying us a visit this week. During rest time we will place our shoes in the hall filled with carrots and hay and hope that when we are done with our rest time that our shoes will be filled with treats. To celebrate, we are going to have pajama day on Tuesday, December 5. Have your child come to school dressed in their favorite jammies for a day of fun! They will still need to wear their tennis shoes with their pj's. :) We also learned that children in the Netherlands bake a letter cake in the shape of the first letter of their name to eat during the St. Nicholas Day celebration. "Prestige Kerstdagen" is the holiday greeting in the Netherlands. Pine wreaths and glass ornaments are used to decorate during this time. I was excited to share with the students that when I was in college I did a study abroad and one of the places I studied in was the Netherlands. I had a pair of real wooden klompens and a glass ornament to show them that came from the Netherlands. They were excited to check these items out! :)
In our centers this week we made our own letter cakes. Students carefully shaped their bread dough into the first letter of their name. After their letter cake baked they got to spread on some butter and add some sugar sprinkles to make the sweet bread treat. We traced, cut out and decorated our own klompens and added some "hay and carrots" to the picture as well. Students practiced writing this new word on their pictures. They are hanging in the hall for you to see. We also made a book about the Netherlands, as well as a fancy hat that tells all about the things we learned on our "travels" to the Netherlands. Finally, we began talking about Las Posadas, the Mexican celebration. We made beautiful poinsettia ornaments to hang on our trees. Right now they are hanging on the board outside our classroom for all to enjoy!
Next week we will continue talking about Las Posadas. We have marked both Mexico and the Netherlands on our class map so that students may see where they are in relation to the United States and North Carolina. I have a beautiful art print to show the students by the Mexican artist, Diego Rivera. Rivera was known for his beautiful murals, so we will work to create a class mural in the style of Diego Rivera. We will also continue to sing Feliz Navidad, one of our new favorites, make a book about Las Posadas and string some Mexican pattern necklaces to celebrate this holiday. We will also introduce the celebration of Hanukkah. We will "travel" to Israel and learn about the origin of this special holiday. We will talk about some of the special symbols that are important to Jewish families. We will paint the Star of David and talk about the triangle shapes we see in it, learn the dreidel game and much, much more!
In math this week we continued playing one of our favorite games...Monster Squeeze. We played as a class, and each child also got to make their own game to take home and play with family and friends. Have your child play this game to work on number recognition, discussing where numbers fall on the number line, and are numbers higher or lower than the "secret number" you are trying to guess. Students also played roll and record, where they rolled two dice and counted and combined the number on each die to record the sum on their recording sheet. It was great fun to see which sum they rolled the most and which sum they rolled the least. We also played the domino parking lot game. Students used the dominoes to count the dots and combine them on each side of the domino to decide where they should "park" their domino on the parking lot sheet. They had lots of fun counting and adding the numbers to park their dominos in the right spot.
Our literacy centers had us writing words around the room. After we wrote them we practiced reading them to a grown up. We also made high frequency word ornaments to hang on our class tree.
Student had fun painting wooden letters and combining them to make new words they recognize. We added several new words to our word wall this week. We added: she, he, to, two, my, me, like and you. We will continue to add new words each week. Have your child look for these words when you are reading to them or see if there are places they can look for these words as they begin to become more familiar with how to read and spell them. Paige was our Marvelous Me girl this week. We discovered that she has a strong man "e" in her name that gives the /a/ in her name the courage to say its long vowel sound. We also talked about how exciting it is that the /g/ in Paige's name makes the /j/ sound. We discovered that /g/ has two sounds. Its most common is /g/ as in goat, but its second sound makes the /j/ sound like in Paige and giant. How marvelous is that?! :)
Finally, this week Gobbles, the turkey who had been leaving us notes and hiding in our classroom decided to sneak out and head back to the farm. We were sad to see him go, but are very excited because in one of his final notes he mentioned his good friend Tinsel may be paying our classroom a visit. We can not wait until Monday to see who and what Tinsel is! Many think he is an elf, others think he is Santa himself. Stay tuned to find out on Monday who Tinsel might be and what he or she might have to say to us! :) Have a wonderful week and a huge thanks to all of you for all the wonderful supplies you have been sending in for us to use to cook with and to help with our unit of study. We really appreciate all your help! One item that we are in need of is a new class basket to carry our PE equipment in when we go out on the field. The one that we had has seen better days. If anyone could send in a large basket (think laundry basket) we would greatly appreciate it!
Reminders:
-Don't forget to send in an extra set of clothes for your child if you haven't already.
-With the weather getting colder we have lots of jackets, mittens and hats at school. Make sure you label your child's items so that if they get lost we know who they belong to.
-Tuesday is Pajama Day!
Upcoming Events:
December 5 - Love and Logic Parenting Session 8:30 am
December 12 - Field Trip to the Laurels 10:00 am
December 19 - Making Gingerbread Houses 1:00
December 20-January 2 - Winter Break - No School
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