Butterfly

We had a special surprise when we arrived at school today. Our butterfly hatched last night! 

If you look in the middle of the blue sky, you can see the butterfly flying!

Semi-Wordless Wednesday!

Crazy Hair Day!

STEM- Build a caterpillar as tall as you can! 

Butterfly Drawings!

Book Reading

Social Learning

We have been learning a lot about how to be a respectful member of our classroom. We have been reading a lot of stories around this topic. We began the year with the book "Have You Filled A Bucket Today?" written by Carol McCloud. With this story we learned that everyone has an imaginary bucket that holds their good feelings. When we are kind and thoughtful, we can help to fill that person's bucket. If we are not kind, we are bucket dippers, and that does not make others feel good. Our goal is to fill everyone's bucket and in doing so, we also fill our own!

We have also begun stories and conversations with the "Incredible Flexible You" series. This is a social thinking curriculum. We have been learning that our actions and the things we do can affect how others around us feel. We have read and discussed three of the books in the series thus far. 

Links for more info. 

 Bucket Fillers

Bucket Filling Song

Math

Each day we have math in our classroom. Generally speaking, we have math every afternoon after lunch. Monday thru Thursday we have new learnings that we build upon throughout the year, and on Friday's we review new learnings from the week. Each day, we begin math with our new lesson, and wrap it up with calendar and counting up to 100. I have included a few pictures from a lesson last week. In this lesson kids were given the challenge to show 5 as many ways they could with 5 popsicle sticks. With this lesson, we were working on solving problems in more then one way, creating representations, and making sense of representations that we and others have created. We were also working on recognizing that even though the representations look different, they all show the same thing.

Ready for calendar! 

Technology

Today we learned about the iPads for the first time. We talked about how to hold them and take care of them at school. We also talked about how the iPads at school are a tool to help us learn.

Today we learned:
* The iPad rules at school could be different then the iPad rules at home.
* Where the home button is.
* How to swipe up to close out apps when we are finished.
* The app "Stage"- We use this app often in place of a dry erase board.

Daily Mile

Have you heard of the daily mile? When we do the daily mile we head up to the track and walk/jog/skip/run laps around the track. This is something we have been doing a few times each week. My goal is for us to work up to doing it each day. At this point we are doing 2 laps to build our stamina but eventually we'll be doing 4 laps each day. This is a great way for us to get in a little extra movement, exercise and fresh air each day. 

Here we are after the daily mile today. 

When we finish we sit or stand on the line to wait for others to finish.

Reader's Workshop

Today we continued to learn how to take care of our books. We have been learning how to hold books, what the different parts of a book are, how to carefully turn the pages, and how to return books back to their spots. This year we will spend a lot of time with books and we are off to a great start!

Monday Choice Time

 So I am realizing I have only been taking pictures during more of our play times! Playing is important....We love it and we do it well, but I promise, we do other things too! I'll try to take pictures of something new tomorrow!

Legos and Sand 

MagnaTiles

Coloring

Art Center and Puzzles

Blocks and Cars

Daily Happenings...

We have been busy continuing to learn about our classroom and each other. This is a really sweet group of children. Thank you for sharing your children with me!