Chinese New Year - Lunar New Year

Maggie Gullon was our guest speaker this morning.  Lindsay's mom taught us about the Chinese New Year.

She brought several special decorations and a slide show.

Joan Le, Dean's mom did a presentation today about the Lunar New Year.

We learned about traditions and celebrations in many countries.

This is the year of the dragon.

The Le family gave each child a special red envelope with a surprise.

Polar Bears and more TLC

We read lots of stories about polar bears and watched a video on the National Geographic website.  Then we made TLC polar bears at centers.  Our tree map was a collaboration of what we learned and used to write our stories.  We are working on complete sentences, neat printing and spacing.  Some children are able to write a sentence that has two ideas connected with the word and.  We call this a SUPER sentence!

We did this TLC lesson at a center during the week.  Parent helpers were helping at the center.

Love the added footprints.  We are working on reading back our stories and making sure they make sense.

We sponge painted some snowflakes around the polar bears.

Later gators thinking and writing.

We are making great progress.  The homework journals are continuing to improve.  Thank you parents for your help at home.

Plenty of Penguins

The kids just love their bag penguins!  Some penguins have special features.

Our tree map has expanded to three columns and we learned about using the pronoun they.

I am so excited to see the growth in our writing.

Beautiful printing, spacing, capitals and periods.

Illustrations with lots of details go with our stories.

Plenty of Penguins in room K-1.

Some of our centers this week included higher numbers and color words.

We did patterning with polar bears.   This is from a unit by Julie Lee.

Listening for ending sounds.  Thanks again to Julie Lee's Frosty Fun unit.

TLC with Kaye Espinosa

My students and I are so lucky!  Kaye Espinosa comes to our class once a week to do a TLC lesson.  Kaye was a kindergarten teacher in Redlands and her grandson is in my class.

Here is the project we will be making today!

Kaye starts with a story.

She sets up the white board with all the pieces being used and in the order they will be introduced.  The kids know what comes next and can hold up the piece that is needed.

The tables are set with each child's stacked project.  The small pieces are put under the main paper.  Kaye gave me a big glue bottle and plastic lids for doing TLC lessons.  I love it.  We use this method every time we glue in my classroom.

Kaye models and decribes each step of the project.

It is a wonderful lesson for listening, following directions, and  staying on task. 

My students love the process and are so proud of their projects.

Everyone is busy working and doing their best work.

I learn so much watching Kaye and it has been a wonderful experience for me and my students.

Kaye with her darling grandson and his Martin Luther King project.
Thanks Kaye , we sure appreciate you!  Have fun at the Northern California K Conference.

January Quilt and Snowmen

We had a busy day working on our January Quilt!  Just love Kimberly Jordano's ideas for Crafty Quilts.  We will put them into a book at the end of the year.

This is our completed January Quilt! 

Here is the snowman welcoming us back to schoool.  Thanks to Doodle bug teaching.

Our funny snowmen are lined up in the windows.  We also did a brace map and wrote stories about our snowmen.