Ms. Marzoni's Class: Ee

Sunday, January 16, 2011

Bears and Pajama Day!

We had a great week at school. We learned our fifth and final vowel, the letter Ee! We read some wonderful books, did great activities and sang some fun "E" songs to help us learn this great letter. One of our favorite books we read was "Elmer the Patchwork Elephant" by David McKee. We all made our own Elmers too!

The thematic unit this week was bears. We learned many interesting things about bears and about how and why they hibernate.

Making teddy bears

Creating patterns using teddy grahams

Polar bear cookies

Graphing the colors of gummy bears

Measuring the capacity of different containers using teddy bear counters

Practicing reading number words using bear flashcards

Making brown bears

Making a snowglobe, we experienced some VERY cold weather at school this week. We started using our imagination and thinking what it would be like to live in a snowglobe. The students completed the sentence, "If I lived in a snowglobe I would..." and drew a picture of their sentence inside the snowglobe. Then used glue and white glitter to make a snow flurry effect, very cute!!

We ended our week with pajama day. Since bears hibernate through the winter we thought we should do a little hibernating of our own! Also, the students brought their favorite bear or stuffed animal to school to share in all the fun.

We enjoyed a yummy breakfast in our pajamas, pancakes, cinnamon rolls, gummy bears, and orange juice.

Mrs. Starr, Caylee's mom, came over that morning to help us set up the breakfast, thank you!

Our "high school helpers" are always a big help!!

The students enjoyed putting on a puppet show with their teddy bears.

That afternoon we enjoyed a bear cake and hot chocolate with marshmallows!

We ended our fun-filled day by watching "Toy Story 3." Everyone loved pajama day, I think we would be great hibernating bears!

Student of the Week: Josh

Coming Up...

Phonics: Yy

Math: Addition

Thematic Unit: Winter and 100th Day of School

Monday, January 16 - No School - Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday

Thursday, January 20 - 100th DAY OF SCHOOL! We will be doing many great activities on this special day. Everyone is encouraged to dress as if you were 100 years old on this day. We love seeing how creative you all can get with these fun costumes. Your teacher will look much older on this day, too!!

100 Cans of Kindness - We are collecting canned goods to donate to a local food bank. This is a collaborative effort by all of Kindergarten. If each student in Kindergarten brings in a canned food then we will have 100 cans to donate. What a great way to count to 100! Please bring canned food no later than Thursday, January 20.

Valentine Boxes - We will be making Valentine mailboxes for our Valentine class party. Please send an empty shoe box to school for your child to decorate. The class party will be Monday, February 14, at 1:45 PM. I will be sending home a list of student names from our class the first week of February so that you all can prepare to exchange Valentine's with one another.

Blog Password: 100

Sunday, January 17, 2010

Bears!!

This week was busy and fun! We learned the letter Ee, this is our fifth and final vowel to learn. We added a new book to our phonics libraries, "Ben Is Ten!". Have your child read this book to you this week, they are becoming great readers. We did many fun activities with this letter, we also enjoyed the book "Elmer the Patchwork Elephant." We created special elephants of our own as well.

We also enjoyed the book "The Snowy Day" by Ezra Jack Keats. We all loved this book and it was a great one to read during these cold days.

Our thematic unit was "Bears", and we learned many great things about bears! We discussed many types of bears and learned how bears and other animals hibernate. Annie and Moby from www.brainpopjr.com helped us as we learned all about hibernation. We also learned about animals which hibernate in different environments and drew pictures of these animals on our Promethean board during centers. We enjoyed learning about hibernation so much that many of the students wanted to "hibernate" all day! But of course, we were too busy to just sleep all day!

We also had pajama day this week. What a fun day!! Everyone dressed in their pj's and brought their teddy bears.

Our teddy bears stayed with us all day as we worked and had fun in Kindergarten. They were great friends to have visit our classroom.

Since we were already in our pajamas, we had breakfast food for snack! We enjoy waffles and syrup, a perfect breakfast for us on PJ Day!

We had a special surprise this week. Ty's dad, Mr. Todd, brought a real black bear to our classroom!! It was so cool! Mr. Todd went hunting in Canada and got this beautiful black bear, he made a rug from it and shared it with us! We shared it with all our friends and took lots of pictures. Everyone loved getting an up close look at a real bear, it had sharp claws and teeth, and its fur was very soft. Everyone thought it was awesome! Thanks to Ty and his family!!

Here we are in our cute pajamas!

As we were snuggling with our pj's and teddy bears, we also enjoyed some yummy hot chocolate with lots of marshmallows.

During the week as we learned about bears we created patterns with Teddy Graham snacks. We made different patterns using chocolate chip, chocolate, and honey Teddy Grahams. Then we had a taste test, everyone chose a favorite flavor. We graphed our results, as a class everyone like chocolate chip Teddy Grahams the best!

We also learned about polar bears and enjoyed polar bear snacks. To make these at home, you'll need an oreo cookie, white icing, mini-marshmallows, and chocolate chips. Cover the oreo with the icing, add the marshmallows for the ears and the chocolate chips for the eyes. And now you've got a yummy polar bear snack!

Here are some teddy bears we made by tearing paper and using button eyes and nose. The boys added a bow tie and the girls added a hair ribbon.

This week we did a fun science experiment. As we were learning about hibernation we discovered that bears eat a lot of food to gain fat to keep them warm throughout the winter. So we put some "bear fat" (shortening) in a ziploc bag and put it in ice. We felt how cold the ice was then put our hands in the "bear fat" to see how the fat was staying warm. Our hands weren't cold when they were in the "bear fat," guess the bears really know how to keep warm, eat lots and have a thick coat!