Thankfulness

Hello family and friends!

It's been a great week in the Aalva class! With Thanksgiving approaching, we've been spending some time talking about the holiday and what it means to us. We will be continuing this throughout the rest of the month. We started the week by asking the kids what they thought "thanksgiving" meant. The majority of our answers revolved around food and playing. It opened the door for some great conversations about time spent with family and friends. We have recorded these answers and hung them up in the hallway if you'd like to check them out. As we continue to talk about Thanksgiving during the next two weeks, we're interested to see how these answers change and expand.

One of the main things we wanted to focus on through our study was the idea of being thankful. We discussed that being thankful is something we feel all through the year...not just on Thanksgiving. We discussed the definition of being "thankful" and agreed that it meant "to be glad you have something in your life". We decided that we tend to be thankful for the things we love and the things that mean the most to us. After talking and reading about being thankful we made a classroom thankful tree. We had the students make leaves using their hand tracings. After tracing their own hand, they cut them out, and wrote a word to describe what they were thankful for. After making our leaves, we went outside into the woods to find some branches. We knew that we wanted the branches to fit inside a vase so we measured our vase and then took some rulers out to measure branches. We looked for ones that were at least two feet long so that they would stick up high enough to hold several leaves. This was a great time exploring the beginning phases of the school's outdoor classroom! There is a path through the woods that leads to an open field that has recently been cleared (we can't wait to see the final product of the new outdoor space!). We measured our sticks and brought them in to assemble our thankful tree. We told the kids that they could add to our tree whenever they wanted to. Anytime they thought of another reason to be thankful, they could make a new leave and hang it up. We have added some cookie cutters for tracing in our art center along with a hole puncher and yarn. The kids have really been excited about this activity and have made everything by themselves! Their tree is sitting outside our classroom door. If you have time, stop by and read some of their sweet notes!

During our thankful discussion we also decided it might be fun to make our own book. This is something that the kids have started doing on their own during their center time. Many of them pull out paper throughout the day and staple it and draw pictures. I think some of this was encouraged by the first grade class a few weeks ago. They came by our classroom with homemade books and read them to us...which the kids loved! Making books has been a hobby in our room ever since. We titled our books, "My Thankful Book". At the top of each page there is written, "I am thankful for...". In our room during read alouds, we talk a lot about what it means to be authors and illustrators. We brought this discussion up again before starting our books. We reminded the kids that they would be both the author and illustrator of this book as they would be the ones to write their thankful words and draw pictures to go along with them. This was a great time for them to focus on the beginning stages of writing. We were so impressed with how sweet and meaningful these books turned out! They will be on display in the hallway this month if you'd like to read them.

Throughout these discussions of being thankful, we have also touched on the idea of traditions. We talked about the fact that each family is different and has different ways that they celebrate Thanksgiving. We talked about differences in the foods we eat, the people we spend time with, the languages spoken in our homes, where our families come from, and any other ideas that the kids brought to the table. We found out that we all have some similarities and differences. We were able to share in our similarities and learn through our differences. It was a great discussion that will hopefully have the kids talking at home about your own family life and traditions. If anyone has any special traditions they'd like share with the class, we'd love to hear about them through pictures, artifacts, etc. Feel free to bring some stuff in or stop by to share your traditions with the class.

I also wanted to take some time in this update to tell everyone about our morning message. Our morning message is written on the dry erase board each morning and read aloud during our morning meeting. We keep the first two sentences the same which are..."Good morning! Today is (day of the week).". The third sentence is always different and discusses what we will do that day or anything important we'd like to tell the class. Throughout the year we've progressed from me reading the message, to the kids reading it with me, to dissecting it (which we've just recently started). We have the kids come up and find words or letters that they know and circle them. They have recently been asking for "tricky" words so we've been adding some challenges each week! This is a great way for us to discuss letters, sight words, punctuation, sentence forms, as well as reading. Even though some of these concepts aren't taught until later in kindergarten, we feel like it's never too early to expose the kids to new ideas! If it clicks with them, then that's great. If it doesn't, then hopefully it'll make those concepts even easier to understand once that time comes for them. I say all this to brag on your sweet ones! They have really embraced this new activity and are always quick to ask for it if I ever forget. I'm so impressed with their desire to learn and their eagerness to try new things!

Here are just a few standards that were covered this week...

Approaches to Learning:

Reason about events, relationships, or problems.
Demonstrate increasing ability to use prior knowledge to understand new experiences.
Represent prior events and personal experiences in one more more ways.
Understand a task can be accomplished through several steps.

Social & Emotional:

Interact easily with familiar adults by engaging in conversations, responding to questions and following direction.
Participate in group life of class.
Display emerging social skills of trying to take turns and talk with others during play.
Express fears and concerns to familiar adults.

Language & Literacy:

Represent familiar people and experiences through art and language.
Use drawings, letters, or words to create narratives about people and things in their environment.
Combine some letters with pretend writing.
Makes some upper case letters without regard to proportion or placement.
Begin to understand the relationship between oral language and written language.
Creates a pictures and labels it orally.
Describe events of personal significance.

Mathematics:

Organize and represent data with real objects.
Associate at least two measurement devices with their purposes.
Use nonstandard units of measure to compare everyday objects.
Compare the lengths of two objects.
Understand and use positional words to describe the locations of objects (up, down, in, over, under, behind, on top of and in front of).
Identify and copy simple patterns.

Writing on thankful leaves...