Beginning of the Festival of Lights-Hanukkah

Spelling for the week of December 5- December 9

came

away

your

who

when

them

because

from

have

there

Challenge Words

winter

festival

lights

Christmas

Lighting up the room!

On Tuesday the students seemed to be rested--following our Thanksgiving break--and ready to jump in to our new theme, Festival of Lights.
Each week prior to Christmas break we thoroughly look at traditions of Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and Christmas. 

We've learned this week about why Hanukkah is celebrated by the Jewish people.  We learned about the eternal light , menorah and the Hebrew blessing with each candle, torah, dreidel, how many nights Hanukkah is celebrated, when Hanukkah is observed this year, what the symbols of Hanukkah are and we played the game with the dreidel.  We played with pennies.  You can also play with gold coins made with chocolate.

Shin--take one penny from your opponent

Mrs. Wiedeman's mini lesson on Tuesday was on Hanukkah.  We saw a short video on DIscovery Education showing how the Heiman family observe Hanukkah.  

Mrs. Wiedeman Read a story, In the Wild Woods and we are inthe process of making our own classs book called "In Our Wacky Woods." 

Ms. Lorfing did Mountain Language with the students for the first time in a center.  The reading groups concentrated on indentifying long U sounds in words from the various stories.  

We worked in our grammar books with Mrs. Lorfing identifying with review of Proper Nouns and Common Nouns.  The listening centers are my favorite this time of year--this week was Christmas related.

While the reading groups met 4 times this week Mrs Lorfing was able to do Handwriting with all the groups. 

During TNT we made beautiful Menorahs with paper plates and foil. 

We worked on the Hundreds board all week with subtraction in Math.   We learned that to move to the right is adding and down is adding.  Moving left and up is subtraction numbers. 

Anna had a birthday on Saturday and brought donuts.  Happy Birthday to our friend!

Two weeks ago we did a science experiment where we made predictions about what will happen to the celery leaves if they sit in colored water over the weekend.  We looked at the veins in the celery where the dye travels up.  I forgot to share the pictures with you.  Today we did classifying information.  We predicted

whether our rubber bands, erasers, paper clips, styrofoam, toy cars, and balls of clay would sink or float. 

Sawyer has done a lot of research on the Earth.  She has looked through the table of contents of many books and browsed pages to see what information peaked her interest about the EARTH.  Today she presented her findings and used the globe and pictures of icebergs, earth and bodies of water.  Bravo and hats off to a very interesting presentation!!!

We are asking students to wear red on Tuesday for the Chiefs Assembly.

The First Graders sang for the Parents Guild today.  Thank you for helping them remember to dress in nice clothes.  As one boy said, "when can i take this sweater off? "  I know what a struggle it can be to get them to wear shoes that are too tight!!!

Have a Great Weekend!