Working Hard, Staying Warm!

Burr, it is getting cold outside!  Last year's warm winter has made this blast of cold weather feel even colder!  We are just not used to this!  However, even though it is cold outside, our classroom is warm with the hustle and bustle of busy children.  Our academic days in January tend to get a little longer, as the children are ready for more sustained work periods and the weather forces us inside for longer stretches at a time.  

This child is improving his fine motor skills by tracing and labeling a snowman.

This student is working on a "Secret Sight Word Code."  Sight words are all the rage right now in our classroom.  Many of our children brought forth large sight word banks from last year, but this year we started using Heidi's Songs to learn to recognize and spell our sight words.  These songs are performed by Heidi on a DVD complete with hand motions.  The children love them.  They love them so much that they convinced me to buy the second DVD of words!  The new selection came last week and we love it as much or more than the last! Yesterday, the academic day was over, children were being picked up and the rest were asking, "Can't we practice our sight words?"  "Of course you can!"

Thursday's are always a special day for our students.  It's Mrs. Sharp's day!  The children look forward to reading with her each week.  Showing off how much they can do!  Of course Mrs. Sharp builds them up so high, you should see the smiles when they leave her table.  This week we made Mrs. Sharp a nice little reading office!  Doesn't it look cozy?

These girls are playing Last Snowman Standing with addition.  The girls roll two dice and add them together to find the sum.  The person with the last snowman wins!  We've played this game a lot this month!!  There is also a subtraction version of this on the shelf.  For many of the children, Last Snowman Standing for subtraction was their first introduction to the operation of subtraction.  You never would know it now!  I did add number lines to the bottom of the game boards so that they could use the number lines to make jumps forward or back depending on the operation.  Such smarty pants these students of ours!