We started the morning off with a couple of books.
We also worked on out Hibernation Song, I found this song on several different websites. It is sung to the tune of "Aloutte." It is a really catchy tune and unfortunately I have been singing it in my sleep and waking up to it for the past several days.
After our morning meeting we continued collecting data on our snowmen. Those who had not finished measuring all their snowmen with the Unifix cubes, finished up. As they finished measuring with the Unifix cubes we moved on to measure our snowmen with marshmallows.
As we measured we noticed that one snowman was 3 Unifix cubes tall and he was 5 marshmallows tall.
For our group activity we went ice skating on the carpet, while listening to "A Skater's Waltz" found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TV4BxDcWus8. Listening to nice soft music and trying to keep up with the rhythm helped keep emotions to a minimum. We got off to a rough start. We had a hard time remembering to keep our feet sliding on the floor, rather than walking normally. Once we got that worked out, we found that socks slipped on the wax paper and made it very difficult to skate. We took our socks off and thought that bare feet would work, it did but not very well. I had given them a full strip of wax paper to skate on and they kept having the wax paper run into things and would come out from under their feet. I cut the wax paper smaller, just bigger than their foot, and that helped. We still were having more frustration than fun, so I rolled up some packing tape and put it on the bottom of their foot and stuck their skate to the tape. Problems SOLVED!!! We were able to skate around the room with the greatest of ease. When we accidentally bumped into each other we learned that we had created static electricity! What a joy, accompanied with many silly giggles, that was to create static electricity and then shock each other.
Snack time had become a time for fussing with each other over simple things. Last week we talked about things that would help make snack time more pleasant for everyone (mostly the teacher as they were oblivious to their whining). From their suggestions, I made a Snack Time schedule for us to follow. Today we followed it, even though we were not perfect at it, things went a lot smoother. (Sorry the picture is a bit fuzzy.) Everyone had a job and we worked together to get our snack ready.
For snack we made tortilla snowflakes, idea came from http://www.clubhousejr.com/recipes/sweet-snowflakes. We altered the recipe a bit, we didn't put it into the oven to bake, we just popped them into the microwave for 30 seconds. I would recommend that you put them on the wax paper as they stuck to the plate as they cooled. While the snowflakes cooled down we ate our orange segments and our cheese sticks. This tasty snack we washed down with some milk.
Because some of us were not dressed appropriately to play outside, we went bowling for snowmen. We had three chances to bowl down the stack of snowmen. Our bowling looked more like an arcade game where we threw the balls at the stack of snowmen to knock them down. After the first round we had a difficult time re-stacking the snowmen. They had attracted some of our static electricity from the carpet and the snowmen kept jumping off the stack to stick to our hands. Silly snowmen!!
Our last activities of the day was to work on our words and letters. There were two centers. Letter matching / spelling and sentencing posting.
The first station that I introduced was the letter matching and word spelling. This station Polar Animal Spelling, is from http://www.2teachingmommies.com/2011/01/polar-lands.html. It was super simple to set up and the girls really liked that they were spelling words. A big kudos to the authors.
The second center was making sentences on a word strip board. The hardest part was trying to get the word cards into the plastic on the word strip board. This activity came from http://thisreadingmama.com/2012/08/10/reading-the-alphabet-letter-tt/. She has some really great ideas for learning the alphabet. I chose this activity because it builds confidence as they are able to read the book on their own.
Word work can be hard work for our brains. Our ending brain break was a game called "Snowman Bump" found at http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Snowman-Stuff-Math-and-Literacy-Freebie-453700. It took a bit to understand the rules, but after a couple of rounds they understood the objective of the game. They wanted to stay and finish playing. That will happen on another day.
Homework - the students have three bits of homework. 1) They were to make and color a book called "Melting Snowman" from http://www.makinglearningfun.com/themepages/SnowmanMeltingEmergentReader.htm. 2) Do a snowman estimation paper, it is an outline of a snowman and they are to estimate how many cotton balls it will take to cover the snowman. Their guess/estimation should be written on the hat. Then they were to take cotton balls and glue them onto the snowman, count the cotton balls and see if their estimation was correct. 3) In my files I had a snowman dot-to-dot with capital letters, I changed them to lower case letters to help them recognize the lower case letters, they are are really good at recognizing capital letters.
What’s meant to be will always find a way.
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