Wowsers!

Wow!  What a busy day we had!  We had our centers this morning and some new fun and exciting things during our SMART time.

Our four centers included continuing work with abcmouse.com.  We had planned on trying a new website, but there was trouble with certain games loading, so we postponed the new site.

We also created an underwater scene using cray-pas and water.  We filled in the blanks to label our ocean animal and its habitat.

We colored in a book titled, I Have Fish.  This book helps us practice our sight words and is great practice for recognizing our color words.

At the last station we made -at family necklaces.  We added colored straws in a pattern to the strings of our necklace.  This was a class favorite!

At SMART time we added in a number crabwalk.  We had to pick a number out of the "ocean" then carry it on our tummy as we crabwalked to a cone with the corresponding number.

On the balance beam, we had some secret words that were covered with cones.  We had to crouch down and lift the coin in order to read the word hidden under the cone.

Our fine motor stations were also new!  We used the muscles in our wrist to take lids on and off of jars.

We had a cup of "hot chocolate" and we had to roll the dice to determine how many marshmallows (cotton balls) we needed to add to the cup.  We had to pick up the "marshmallows" with a tweezers.

We also worked on our cutting skills by cutting out snowflakes.

Onto Thursday...

We had a great literacy time today.  We were able to extend our reading stamina to 11 minutes!  We practiced using features of a non-fiction text, table of contents and index.  If you have a non-fiction book at home that includes these features, have your child explain to you how they work!

We also compared and contrasted ocean animals and animals that are pets.  It was fun and interesting to debate some of the animals that were mentioned!

During math we learned a new game, Monster Squeeze.  We have to guess a number that is in between two numbers and as we make guesses, the space between the monsters shrinks.  We even wanted to play this game during choice time today!

We journaled using the ipads today.  We tried using separate "recording stations" on the carpet side of our room to cut back on the background noise. 

 Here are some of today's journals:

Freya's Journal                      Elijah's Journal                              Alex P.'s Journal
Lucy's Journal                       Cooper's Journal                           Lena's Journal

Thanks for sticking with this long post!  See you tomorrow!

Love,
Mrs. Huettl