The Hive: Thanksgiving Edition

Happy Thanksgiving, Wonderful K/1 Parents! I am hoping and praying that today is a day of rejuvenation and reflection upon all you are grateful for this day. I am thankful for my family and friends, as well as the amazing opportunity to be your super-star's teacher!

If your kiddo has some extra time over the extra-long weekend, they could get a sneak-peek and practice at the sight-words coming up this week:

Our essential question in "Journeys" reading this week: 

We will be studying Joshua and Caleb in Bible, have some fun water-experiments in science, and maps in social science. "Gingerbread Community" will be our theme all month long, as well as the Nativity story. Students will begin practicing their lines and songs for our Christmas production. In math, we will be applying and extending upon principals of subtraction. We will be adding technology to our math rotation, which has been going amazingly well!

The bees are going to love the gingerbread activities this month! 

 Our verse this week is one of my favorites!

Some Thanksgiving highlights from Sonshine: 

Have a blessed holiday and know that I am continually praying for you and your children. If you have any needs we may be able to assist with, prayer requests, or questions-please do not hesitate to email me! If you have a general question about school events, classroom procedures, or work coming up, you could also post a comment on this blog so that everyone can benefit from your question and the answer. Many times when one question arises, others are wondering the same thing! (: 

I am so thankful for you and the hard work you do as parents. Enjoy your holiday!

An Attitude of Gratitude!

Hello, generous K/1 parents! Thank you for providing brown bags, craft supplies, and signing up for food for our Stone Soup activity his coming Tuesday. Please check your child's green folder. There you will find details about what you can bring for our Thanksgiving celebration on Tuesday, Nov. 24th at school. This is not the same as the Harvest Dinner at Faith Baptist church tomorrow at 11:00 am. I am hoping to see you there! The kiddos have been practicing their songs for the celebration!

We have been discussing thankfulness and listing our blessings. We have had some writing prompts about what we are thankful for and these kiddos warm my heart with how grateful they are!

We started doing a rotation in math, and now have three math groups. It is very much like the Daily 5 rotation we do for reading. Soon we will be adding "Math With Writing" and "Math With Technology" to our "Math With Teacher", "Math With Someone" (math centers) and "Math By Myself" (math independent work and math facts at desk). By doing this, I have additional math time with each group, more one-on-one time with students, and it allows for greater differentiation within the instruction. Math centers can be unique to the learners' needs and encourage creative thinking in math, often elaborating on the concept introduced and coming up with unique ways to represent numbers and math problems.

Speaking of gratitude, we are so thankful for the Mrs. Lee/Mrs. Palmer bunch! They delivered notes to students in our Hive, demonstrating our Fruit of the Spirit in November, by spreading JOY!

And we are thankful for Ms. Jones' class too! We made a project with them that we will be wearing to our Thanksgiving Stone Soup gathering on Tuesday. We used Native American symbols and told our own stories through pictographs.

 I have to give a HUGE SHOUT OUT to our Busy-Bees!!! Every single one of them mastered their sight words this week. I gave a final assessment of this on Friday, and they blew my mind! Keep up that practice at home, it is paying off!

Next week will be all about Thanksgiving! We will focus in on our Novel Study of Thanksgiving on Thursday with some character and vocabulary lessons, doing some fun Thanksgiving activities and having our Stone Soup Thanksgiving feast on Tuesday.

Some highlights from our week...

Thankful for Our Hive!

Hello, incredible K/1 parents! Thank you for "buzzing" by to find out what's happening in The Hive at Sonshine! Well, the bees are busy as ever and I am so proud of their diligent work! This week we have been studying about Veterans Day. We have also returned our focus to "Bucket Filling" and will put that into on Friday when we helped to put the Operation Christmas Child Shoeboxes together! How exciting! Thank you for all of your help!

We listened to a story from Hebrews during chapel, and the students acted out Rahab and the spies. We practiced the songs we will be singing at our Harvest dinner at 11:00 am on November 22nd. If you haven't RSVPed to this event, please fill out and return the form that was sent home in our green folders. I am hoping to see all of you there!

Quiet spies...

Beautiful voices singing praise!

We did a fun writing activity in which students filled each other's bucket with words of kindness. The bees chose a random name of a classmate out of a bucket and wrote a note to that person. They made little "buckets" and distributed their notes. Some students wrote one to me, and I have to say that my bucket was overflowing! It was such an amazing activity, that it is going to become a part of our regular community life in the Hive!

 

 

Mr. Bob Dewitt came in for math centers on Monday! As a former special education teacher, he really has a big heart for helping students succeed!

 

 

 

We have a new seating arrangement! Ta-Da! The students are doing a fabulous job!

 

 

 

I saw a great idea online and made a hopscotch outside using our sight words! This is a fun activity you can also do at home! Students can read the sight word that their stone or stick lands on when they throw it! They can also read each one they hop on!

Help Needed! 

There are a few items that we need for Thanksgiving projects coming up. If you could contribute any of the items, we would be ever-so-grateful.

Brown, grocery bags

Plastic pony-beads in a multitude of colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, cream, white, and brown.

Pipe cleaners in any color.

In addition, we could really use some baby-wipes so students can clean their desktops during the day when needed. We are also going to start a "morning-classroom-helpers" routine in our classroom and these would be wonderful!

 

Please do not worry if you can't contribute the items listed above. There are other ways that you can help if you would like to. We need help on the Tuesday before our Thanksgiving break. We have planned a rotation of fun activities in our classrooms and a Thanksgiving feast! This will be on Tuesday, Nov. 24th from 9:15-1:00 p.m. From our Hive, we need "roots" vegetables to be brought in (we read about "roots" in Thanksgiving on Thursday). We will bring in prepared (clean, chopped) potatoes and carrots to go into our "stone soup" that will be served that day. In addition, we need lots of helping hands to assist with the activities planned in our classrooms (games and arts and crafts) as well as help preparing (cooking) the feast and setting the "tables". Please let me know as soon as possible if you can help in anyway! If you can come for just part of the time, that would be also be lovely and so appreciated! Thank you!

 

Our theme next week will be Thanksgiving as we continue our novel study "Thanksgiving on Thursday", which explore the first Thanksgiving and provides history about the Wamponoag people. We will do some fun activities in our Daily 5 reading time and in math centers such as a Thanksgiving "write-the-room" and "roll-a-turkey" in math centers. We will have a fun science experiment involving popcorn that will incorporate the mathematical concept of measurement! 

Our Anchor Text for next week:

Our sight words:

Our spelling words:

Our memory verse next week will be the same one that we focused on last week.

Check out these photos of hard-working bees this week:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Operation Christmas Child: We had a blast filling up the shoeboxes, a great bucket-filling activity, indeed!

 

 

 

 

 

We surprised Mrs. Bradshaw with a "Happy Birthday" song at the end of the day on Friday!