January - Wonderful Winter

Our theme this month is Wonderful Winter!

Here's our January Song:

This month we learned all about Winter.

During our Fantastic Fall theme, we discussed hibernation, and this month talked a little more about a bear's hibernation.  We read a fun book, "Bear Snores On", and made a delicious bear snack!

Even though we didn't have any snow - we talked about snow - how it feels, what it looks like, where it comes from, and what we can do in it.

Together, we brainstormed words beginning with 'snow' and made a list of them.  Then the students chose which words to use in their own "Snow_______" books.

After writing their words, they illustrated a winter scene, incorporating all the snow words used.

We also talked about what behavior humans change during the winter.

We created a word bank by making a list of clothing we wear in the winter to keep warm.  We practiced our decoding strategies while each student  took a turn stretching out the sounds we heard in the words and writing them in our word bank. In this Interactive Writing experience, we established a purpose and genre for our writing. Later, the text was available for student reference while they wrote and illustrated a paper on "What We Wear During Winter".  

 Every morning we begin with a mini lesson on phonics.  One activity the children love to do is sing the phonics version of "The Alphabet Song" while pointing to each letter.  This helps polish our letter name and sound recognition skills.

We love our whiteboard time!

Practicing the correct letter and number formation in a group setting encourages the students to help each other, providing them with a teaching opportunity.  It is also an easy way for me to quickly assess a child's progress.

We had our Shared, Interactive, Guided and finally, Independent reading experiences with our Balanced Literacy book, "Snow".

 After reading our books to the class . . . 

each student chose a "friend" to read the book to, as well : )