December, January Catch-up!

I am seriously so sorry that I am so behind in blogging! I am going to do a quick catch-up post, and hopefully do better from here on out.

*I apologize about the lack of pictures!*

We loved our Gingerbread Guy/Girl week! We read several different Gingerbread stories. Tuesday we read a tradtional Gingerbread story, and then moved on to Gingerbread Baby (Jan Brett), Gingerbread Cowboy, Gingerbread Girl, and my new Gingerbread book for this year--Gingerbread Pirates. The students liked the different "twists" on the story, and you can see that Gingerbread Baby and Gingerbread Pirates was their favorite. I love Jan Brett--her illustrations are amazing! The students liked making their gingerbread cookies. A HUGE thanks to Kiley's mom, Colleen for making all the cookies. Also, thanks to Lexi's mom, Amanda, and Ava's mom, Erin, for helping us that day.

I hope everyone liked their Christmas presents. The students enjoyed making them, and that's the most important thing! They took great pride in putting the candle in and wrapping the present. I didn't get any pictures of our Christmas song/program, but thanks so much to all the parents who were able to come to that! I think it's a great thing for the students to learn to do that. The afternoon class didn't get to make their Christmas trees at school, but hopefully it was fun to make those at home. Afternoon class spent that time making a going away present for Lilli, who moved. Paige will now be coming to afternoon class. The last picture is of Britton. He really enjoyed making his Christmas card for his parents. I love seeing students get really into a project.

These pictures are from the first week of January. I couldn't believe there was no snow! I even bought fake snow to do some snow activities with, but when we mixed it up, it had a really weird consistency, and the morning class decided they didn't like playing in it, so we decided to just save the snow activities and we'll bring in some real snow when/if we get some!

The students did a cut and match letter review sheet. They did great! I know it seems simple to you, but it is a true stepping stone for them to be able to match the letters like that. For letter S we made snowmen. They enjoyed decorating the snowmen however they wanted. The bottom picture is of our bulletin board we made. So cute!

This last week I seriously forgot to take a single picture! Bad! I'm sorry. We spent time learning letter Mm and reviewing our other letters. We also started making number books. These will not come home until they are all finished--after number 10. For music, on Tuesday we listened to samples of different music and talked about how it made us feel, and then we danced to some of the music. Some of the samples I used were Jack Johnson ("Upside Down" from Curious George), Jon Schmidt ("Last Lullabye--Thomas's song" and "First Run"), Taylor Swift ("Never Grow Up"), Raffi ("Shake my Sillies Out"), and a South Pacific Island group ("Abebe"). It was interesting to watch--the music instantly affected them--they could tell exactly how it was meant to make them feel. We also did the Hokey Pokey. On Thursday we talked about beat and practiced making a beat and using a drum. (You are welcome for not sending one home!)

I think I'm caught up now! Enjoy!