Happy New Year!

Welcome back everyone! We are so excited for the year 2009! Today was a day to start fresh! We were working on improving our word habits, neatness, and behavior. Mrs. Myers even moved our desks into a new shape. Our theme this week was people. It was a rule breaker, with a twist. The only rule breaking part, was the "decoration e" on the end. It was not a popular word family, but it was a noun. We were quick to see the "eo" vowel pair. In math today, we made a gingerbread man glyph. A glyph is an art project that collects data. We collected data about gingerbread and winter. Tomorrow, we will make some pictographs using our glyphs. There were very messy and fun! After lunch, we read our first version of the The Gingerbread Man. In this version, they were new characters and a new ending. Ask us how the fox eats the gingerbread man. After this, we took a tour of the new reading workshop packet. We were very excited for new activities. Our old packets are in our mail today. Finally before music class, we had a making words activity. Instead of working as a whole group, we worked with a partner to make words from the letters. Then, we shared the words and Mrs. Myers wrote them in lists of two, three, and four letter words. Then, we made the "super-jumbo-bonus word". It was the word "escapes". After music, we had a new center tour. We have two games centers. The first one is putting gingerbread boys in short vowel "ovens" to match their missing sound. The second one is a "when-who-where" retelling center. We were sorting and writing. In the magnetic letters center, we are using gingerbread men on cookies trays to make word family words for -ake, -ack, -ike, -ick. Last, at the listening center, we are listening to a video on the internet of Jan Brett reading and sharing how she wrote and illustrated the story, Gingerbread Baby. Then, we made a personal connection to the problem in the story. It was a great day back!