Elmer the Elephant Week!

As promised, although sorry it's a little late, here is some of the great stuff from our last week's theme unit - Elmer the Elephant by David McKee! We read 6 of the Elmer books, voted on our favorites at the end of the week, and completed daily "following directions" art projects along with worksheets that tied in with our math work!

Bar Graph - "Elmer" (the original introductory book) turned out to be the winner!

Some of the group art-work was just too cute to take down, so I hung the mosaic "team-work" Elmer and our Handprint Herd together over the cabinet in our room! Love the idea of a "We are one awesome herd" bulletin board or door display, but this is what I had space for and I'm thinking it'll stay up for a while!

 By the way - that mosaic Elmer was such a cool project! The kids really got into it... I made one big elephant cut-out on black butcher paper, cut it into 8 sections and each student was responsible for mosaic-ing his/her own section with help from an adult if needed. Then we had to work as a team to put all of the pieces back together to make one big "patchwork" patchwork elephant! I just LOVE it!!

Last but not least, here is a quick pic of 2 of the worksheets I made to go with our read-alouds. On the first day, we read talked about descriptive words and colored elephants differently for a "Special Day Parade" and of course, counted the elephants too! The second pic here is from Day #4, a review of some pattern-making that we had touched on in math lessons throughout the week - students completed letter patterns and then made their own elephant patterns with colors or more letters!

I had a lot of fun spending a week with Elmer and I think our kiddos did too! One of the books - Elmer and the Big Bird - presents a great anti-bullying message so I think I'm going to keep that one checked out from the library for another week and see if I have any student council members that would like to read it to some of our primary classes!

Time for a break...

I am so proud of everyone's work on letters A-E over the first 6 weeks of school - we're writing and building letters, words, and even some sentences! We've been rocking out to the StoryBots songs on YouTube and other fun songs for each letter too! This week, we're going to take a break from letter work and phonics songs to do an author/character study on Elmer the Elephant by David McKee. I'm so excited because Elmer is one of my favorite characters in any children's book and all of the books teach amazing lessons about being yourself, not bullying others, and teamwork! Check back this week for pictures (sorry I didn't upload any last week - but I promise I will this week - I've been ALL over Pinterest!!) haha! Have a good weekend, yall!! :)

D is for DINOSAURS!

Letter Dd week was super busy, but very fun!

We spent a few days with some "D for Dinosaur" stories and crafts, but then reviewed our first 4 letters and even practiced putting words/pictures in alphabetical order (A-D only for now)!

We had our Day #20 visit from Zero the Hero - he brought us some Super Star stickers and we super hero made masks out of paper plates (Pinterest!) after we did a worksheet all about #20 together!

On Friday, our school's Student Council held a mini-assembly before dismissal about standing up against bullying - the student presenters did a fantastic job and we're looking forward to the next one!

THANK YOU!!!

I just want to quickly use this forum to send a big thank you out to a lot of very deserving awesome people!

Thank you to Mrs. Jane's Uncle Tom who donated a TON of amazing "Prize Box" toys, books, puzzles, and more to our class! How crazy that the gift lot would include some of my kiddos' most favorite things - like an Owen and Mzee book for a boy who has retold the story of friendship and sand along with the O and M songs on YouTube for a year now! (Look it up if you don't know the story - it's pretty awesome!)

Thank you to all our coworkers, friends, and family who helped make the JDRF Walk in Newport today such a huge success! I always love walking with the Cahill family and knowing that I work with some people who took the time and effort to read about Jill's battle with Type 1 Diabetes and donate to the cause is icing on the cake!

Thank you to everyone who has helped me deal with some stress these past couple of weeks - you know who you are and I hope you know how much your support means to me!

We had a great week working on letter C and continuing to practice singing, signing, spelling, and creating with warm colors - looking forward to next week!

Blooming flowers!

Look what we saw at recess today!

In other news... I'll have to post pictures this weekend, but we made our own class book this week called Who Stole the Cookies from the Cookie Jar? We are great authors - the book has real pictures, funny rhymes, and a silly ending! More to come :)