Thanksgiving

This morning we read the story "'Twas the Night Before Thanksgiving" by Dav Pilkey.  It is a fun story about eight students who visit a farm on the day before Thanksgiving.  While at the farm, they meet eight turkeys that Farmer Mack Nugget plans to chop up for Thanksgiving feasts!  This upsets the students who come up with a plan to smuggle the turkeys off of the farm and on to the school bus.  They do this by stuffing the turkeys under their shirts and taking them home to be their special Thanksgiving guests!

We had another lesson on symmetry today.  We made some really fun turkey hats and had to make sure the feathers on each side matched, or be symmetrical.  We did a great job!

   

   

   

This afternoon, the whole school played Turkey Bingo.  Mr. Ball, our custodian, was the bingo caller. When we got a bingo, we had to jog down the hall and gobble all the way to the prize table near the library.  Everyone got a bingo and we had SO MUCH FUN running and gobbling down the hall!  What a fun way to spend the afternoon.

   

   

At the end of our day today, instead of saying one thing we appreciated about our day, each student shared one thing that they were thankful for.  It was such a wonderful time hearing things we are all grateful for.  

   

Happy Thanksgiving from Mrs. Kurt's little turkeys!

Now one with their silly faces!

Ask your child to sing our Thanksgiving songs for you...Five Fat Turkeys, Turkey Dinner and The Turkey is a Funny Bird.  They are pretty cute!

Weather

Last week, our unit was on Weather.  We started out by making a list of all the weather words we could think of...

We came up with a pretty good list!

One of the big projects we did was on the water cycle.  Mrs. Kurt split us up into four teams...being part of a team meant everyone had to work together to complete the project.  We created large pictures of the sun, a cloud, raindrops and a puddle by using poster board, torn paper pieces and glue sticks.

   

   

We worked really well together and Mrs. Kurt was really proud of how we cooperated to complete the work.  We are almost done with the display in the hallway...look for some photos on it tomorrow!

Team Cloud

Team Puddle

Team Raindrops

Team Sun

Guest Reader

Last Thursday, we were lucky enough to have a guest reader visit our classroom for Reading Workshop.  Mrs. Tori Holtz teaches fourth grade half days and spends the other half of her day as the Literacy Trainer for Northview.  Mrs. Holtz is learning about the district's new literacy program implementation and she is teaching the other Northview teachers about it as well.  She actually came to our room and did a read aloud with us.  

She read us the story "One" by Kathryn Otoshi.  This is a wonderful story that portrays as we all learn about numbers, counting and colors, we also learn about accepting each other's differences and how it sometimes takes just one voice to make everyone count.  We loved this story!

   

Throughout the story, Mrs. Holtz let us share our thinking and we learned lots of new strategies for read aloud.  We are learning that we do not need to always raise our hands to speak and sometimes we might even have the same great idea as someone else in the group.  She also had some really good questions that made us think...

   

Another really cool thing about this was she let us keep the book and she has another one she is going to share with us called "Zero".

     

 We learned so much from Mrs. Holtz.  Mrs. Kurt did, too.  We are working really hard on this new type of read aloud and are excited to implement something new in to our classroom!  Thank you, Mrs. Holtz.  We hope you come to visit us again soon.

Art Adventure

Today we had a special guest in our classroom.  Mr. Jason Sutherlin, Sophia's dad, came for Art Adventure.  Art Adventure is a program that our PTO funds and is sponsored by the Minneapolis Institute of Art.  The institute trains volunteers to come into classrooms and teach the students about specific pieces of art that are actually at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.  He introduced us to three new pieces of art and he stayed and had lunch with us.  Thank you, Mr. Sutherlin!  And thank you Northview PTO!

   

If you and your family would be interested in seeing these pieces of art in person, visit the Minneapolis Institute of Art.  Admission is FREE and it is a great place!

Save a Turkey!

We read a story this week called "A Plump and Perky Turkey".  It was about a turkey that outsmarted the townspeople so they could not eat the turkey for Thanksgiving.  It made us wonder if turkeys get nervous this time of year...so we came up with ideas of things we could eat instead.  Then we completed this sentence:  Save a Turkey!  Eat more __________.  We made turkeys and added our writing.  You should see how cute they are!

   

   

  

   

Loop Turkeys

Well, it took us a couple of days but we completed our adorable loop turkeys to hang in our classroom. We had to listen carefully and follow lots of directions, but we did it!  We also worked together to help each other out when needed.  We are learning to be thankful for our classmates!

   

   

Our Butterfly Quilt

In Math this week, we continued our work on patterns and created our butterfly quilt.  We learned about symmetry and created our beautiful butterflies for the quilt.

   

Next we made our quilt squares, using orange and brown paper.

   

Then we all worked together to assemble the quilt.  It was hard work but we did it.

   

Look at how it turned out.  And look at all of the different patterns you can see.  We found patterns that go across, up and down, diagonally...lots of patterns!

It is such a good feeling when we all work together to complete an awesome project!