Suessical Celebration!

We celebrated a birthday last week! March 2nd was Dr. Suess' birthday, and what better way to honor him than to read and celebrate some of his wonderful books!? We started out our week by reading "The Cat in the Hat", and made this cute Thing One and Thing Two handprint craft to go along with it.

For a math center, we had his "Happy Birthday to You" book on display, and made some cake! We had cakes numbered one to ten, and had to add the corresponding amount of candles to each cake. The kids enjoyed singing Happy Birthday to Dr. Suess as they decorated the cakes.

We also had a reading center this week with our bean bags, and several of Dr. Suess' great books! My daughter McKenzie is off-track right now and read several of the books to the kids during centers. We like to read, we love to learn, Dr. Suess is the best, let the pages turn!

We read his "ABC" book, and then used our stamp pads and alphabet stamps to stamp our letters in alphabetical order.

Dr. Suess has so many great books, that it was hard to choose which ones to spotlight. At this center, we honored his 'Tooth Book" and made playdough teeth for this man's toothless grin. 

We sorted our colors with these cute fish bowls that I found here. We used colored goldfish, so of course, we had to eat some too!

For our homework sheet, I sent home an -at word ending practice sheet. We also practiced writing these words in school too. Writing is fun ,writing is cool, we love to do it, especially at school!

Great job Eliza!

And Lexi too!

In honor of Dr. Suess' "The Foot Book", we practiced tying our shoes this week. For those who don't know how to tie yet (most of us), we practiced lacing our laces in a letter X.

We had a puzzle center that had 4 Dr. Suess puzzles, along with a Dr. Suess matching game.

And, we had a great time at this center trying to balance these jars like the Cat in the hat balances. We stacked them high, we stacked them low, we stacked them on our head, you know!

And, we just had to try out making some Oobleck from Dr. Suess' "Bartholomew and the Oobleck". You can make your own at home with just some cornstarch and water.

This video shows its unique consistency.

Check out our Horton craft from "Horton Hears a Who".

Dr. Suess isn't the only birthday that we celebrated this week.....

We also had the pleasure of singing to this super cute 5 year old!

Happy Birthday Lexi!

and 

Our stars of the week this week were:

Dominic

and Addison!

We are having so much fun learning about our friends!

Field trip and the news

Here are a few pictures from our Field trip to the KSL 5 newsroom. Below are the kids just arriving, so excited for a field trip!

We got to see where all the news and weather predicting happens! There sure were a lot of big screen TV's in this room!

This is the screen that the weather man stands in front of.

A news reporter in the making!

We had so much fun with the DJ for FM100! She played a song for us to dance to, and even announced our visit on air!

We talked about the weather and weather forecasters in school this week too. For this math center, we added the number of raindrops shown on the cloud with our water droppers. 

We also practiced our alphabet with our alphabet mats. We put them in order several times.

We also talked about different forms of measurement this week. We had this kit that helped us try out different ways to measure things such as paper, our feet, and a paintbrush. We picked a card and followed its instruction. Some of the ones you see below are "How many worms does it take to measure the foam foot?" and "How many worms long is a piece of paper?"

We also made different shapes with our geoboards. But, not only did we make shapes this time, the shapes formed the outlines to these fun pictures! 

Our spelling words for this week were: news and sun

Presidents Day

We are starting to learn about money, and a distinction between the different coins and number valures. And, in honor of President's Day, we also talked about some of the most famous President's represented on our coins, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. We made these cute finger puppets with the penny and the quarter.

Right now I just want to familiarize the kids with the different looks of each coin, and how many common coins there are (4). We practiced sorting pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters at this center.

We also made some patterns with these coin pattern mats from Lakeshore. This too is a great exercise for the kids to see the differences between each coin. Once they know the four coins by sight pretty well, they will easily be able to start memorizing the values of each coin.

We touched upon the lives of George Washington and Abe Lincoln, and one story we told was that of George Washington and the apple tree. We talked about what it means to be honest, and practiced our math skills with these number mat trees and apple manipulatives.

For a writing center, we did a word search this week. We looked for words such as flag and Eagle.

For a fine motor activity, we practiced our lacing skills. We talked about how the President of the United States wears lots of suits, and used our shape recognition skills to add buttons to our different dress shirt lacing mats.

We had some enlarged coins and dollar bill magnetic money that the kids sorted and played with. They had fun sorting and really examining what and who is on each currency.

In our block center, we had the Lincoln logs out. We read a book about Abraham Lincoln and how he lived in a log cabin when he was a boy. We read about how because he didn't have much money, he taught himself by reading lots of books. We built our own log cabins and used great teamwork.

We recite the Pledge of Allegiance each day in class. We also talk about how there are 50 stars on the flag that represent the 50 states in the US. We had this talking map out this week that the kids could visit. They could push on each state to hear the state name and a fact about it. They had a lot of fun finding our home state of Utah.

Spelling words of the week: Map and Log

And, we also had fun learning some new things about our star of the week this week!

Our star Zachary!!