Gingerbread Houses!

This is a late post, but I wanted to share our gingerbread pictures from last Friday!  The kids had a fun time!  Thank you to the moms and grandmas that came to help.  And another huge thank you to all families for helping to supply the materials for our houses!

Before decorating we read the story: The Gingerbread Baby.  During our house decorating the children were able to create their own gingerbread baby to put inside their house!  Here the kiddos are rubbing a cinnamon stick on the sandpaper baby!

Word Families & Literacy Centers

Our big focus during our literacy block is learning how to slowly stretch words.  This is a necessary skill for both reading and writing.  To work on this skill we are using Elkonin boxes.  These are simply three to four empty squares and the children slide counters up into one square at a time for each sound they hear in a word. This week we have Christmas Elkonin boxes at one of our language centers to work on stretching!

 
We are also working hard on word families!  Our first word family was the /at/ family.  This week we are working on the /an/ family.  Below you can see a friend is working on our read it, build it, write it word family book.  In learning word families the children begin to have a larger amount of words they can read by sight without having to sound them out.  They also learn to find these word family "chunks" within other words which will help them with their reading.

Below a friend is using the Elkonin boxes to build words with the /an/ chunk.  

  As we work on each word family we are creating word sliders for our book boxes so we can continue to work on read this words quickly!

Dreidel

For theme study we are looking at how other cultures celebrate the holidays.  On Monday we learned about the celebration of Hanukah.  After reading and talking about the celebration we learned how to play the dreidel game!  I hope you had a chance to play with your child at home!

Yum! Yum! in my Tum!

We finished our day with theme study!  We read a new version of the Gingerbread Man....it was called the Gingerbread Bear!  The kids enjoyed it!  After our story we went to our tables and completed a book on how to decorate a cookie!  After making our book we used the book to decorate a real cookie!  The kids had a blast!   Here are a few snapshots of our decorating!

We graphed our first bite of our gingerbread cookie!  Must kiddos chose to take a bite of the head!  We will complete some data analysis tomorrow on our first bite graph!

Writing Celebrations

We are starting to wrap our informational book writing unit.  We are getting ready to write fictional stories next! The kiddos shared their books with each other during writer's workshop.  Next week we will take all of our writing out of our folders and bring it home before Christmas break.  Below are a few photos of the kiddos sharing their books with each other.

A little late.....but below are the goals we are working on throughout this week and part of next week.