The Week at a Glance

Just wanted to share some photos of the fun things we did this week…enjoy!

   

  

   

   

  

   

   

Meet Mr. Peterson

We want you to meet a new friend of ours…Mr. Connor Peterson.  Mr. Peterson is a junior at Eagan HIgh School and will be spending time in our classroom a couple of afternoons a week volunteering.  He will help out in the classroom and even after school, getting projects ready for us to do in class.

Mr. Peterson is actually a former Northview All Star!  He attended Northview Elementary grades K - 5, and he was even in Mrs. Kurt's afternoon kindergarten class her first year at Northview!  It is so great to have him here and we look forward to working with him.  Welcome, Mr. Peterson!

Sharing our Writing

On Friday afternoon, we had the opportunity to get together with Mrs. Anderson's Kindergarten class and share some of the stories we have been writing in Writing Workshop.  It was so fun to hear what they are writing and for us to share what we are writing, too!

   

   

   

   

Unit of Study: Eric Carle

You've probably already heard the news that we launched our new Literacy Unit of Study this week.  We are studying the author/illustrator Eric Carle!  We have read a few of his books this year, but we are now digging deeper into how Eric Carle writes and illustrates his amazing books.  We started this unit by putting lots of his books on the rug and just looking at them, noticing and wondering things about the books.

   

   

   

After we explored his books for a while, we did a community writing project and listed things that we noticed about his books after just looking at them!

We visited Eric Carle's website and sent him an e-mail.  He is now 85 years old and does not respond to all of his e-mails, but he does have a newsletter and we subscribed to that.  Each day during our Morning Meeting, we visit his website and go to the Frequently Asked Questions section to learn a few more things about him.  Be sure to ask your Kindergartner what they know about him so far…they should be able to tell you how he makes his pictures, what his first book was (The Very Hungry Caterpillar), what comes first when he writes a book…words or pictures (Eric Carle says you need an IDEA first!), how long it takes him to write a book (It depends…he wrote The Little Cloud in one week but it took him two years to write Do You Want To Be My Friend?!), his favorite book that he has written (Do You Want To Be My Friend? because it is about friendship) and even when he grew his beard!  We are learning so much about him!

Here are a few of the books we read this week during our Interactive Read Aloud time…

   

   

When we went to Computers with Mrs. Fleck this week, we saw a video of Eric Carle reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar and we created caterpillars using the Tux Paint program.  In Art, Ms. Mathieson showed us a video about how Eric Carle makes his pictures and we are going to do that in Art.  We even had a student go home and research Eric Carle online.  She brought in the information she found and shared it with the class!  We are very excited to keep learning more about Eric Carle and look forward to sharing our learning with you!

Good Stuff Snowmen

Our Good Stuff Snowman project was a huge success.  Thank you to everyone for sending in some really good stuff so we could embellish our creations.  The project started out a little rocky.  You see, we had to make our paper snowman by tearing the white paper…we could not use scissors.  Some of my friends were not too keen on this idea.  Once I convinced them that they actually knew how to tear paper long before they ever learned how to use a scissors, they were ready to give it a try.  We practiced making small tears on some practice paper and then we got to work!

   

After we got the white paper torn and glued on to our background paper, we read the story "Snowballs" by Lois Ehlert.

In this story, a family has been saving lots of good stuff in a brown bag.  After a big snowfall, the family uses the "good stuff" in the brown bag to help decorate their snow creations.  They make a snow dad, snow mom, snow boy, snow girl, snow baby, snow cat and a snow dog!

Following the story, we used the "good stuff" in our own brown bags to embellish the torn paper snowman we started earlier.  We had a great time doing this project and they turned out so cute.  It was mostly so fun to see friends sharing their good stuff and using their kind words to encourage and compliment each other while completing this project.  I love seeing this "ALL STAR" behavior!

   

   

   

  

   

   

Welcome Back!

Welcome back and Happy New Year!  I hope you all had a restful and relaxing Winter Break.  It was so great to get back to school and see all of our friends this week.  Here is a quick recap of some of the fun things we did...

We talked about resolutions and learned that a resolution is a promise to do something better or to not do something.  We read the story "Squirrel's New Year's Resolution" by Pat Miller.  We thought of our own New Year's resolutions and made pages for a new class book.  We will be sending this home starting next week!

   

We have been spending quite a bit of time on reviewing school rules, procedures and expectations this week.  One thing we worked on was our sketching for Writer's Workshop.  We observed a picture from the book "Jamaica's Find", thought about how to sketch, took our time and did an excellent job!  We had a "Museum Walk" when we were finished so we could all admire each other's work!

   

   

We completed a Math graphing and survey activity.  We asked the question "What did you wear today?", referring to what we wore on our hands.  Did you wear mittens, gloves, or did you have bare hands?  We each had to place one of our gloves or mittens on the rug.  On Tuesday, more students wore gloves!  Thankfully no one had bare hands that day!!

   

We also spent time working on our Math Workplaces.  It was a very busy week, even though we only had school four days!