My Plans This Week

This week is about Hanukkah.  We will be reading and learning about Hanukkah.  I have a few Hanukkah books that I like to read to my class.  One is Mrs. Greenburg's Messy Hanukkah by Linda Glaser.



I also like to read The Trees of the Dancing Goats by Patricia Polacco.


This book is long so I plan on dividing it over a couple of days.  I have a few other books that I plan on reading.  One is the Dreidel Song and the other one is Oh Hanukkah.  I'm not Jewish, but I love the Dreidel Song.  I find myself singing all the way through the book.  I once had the song as my ring tone for the month of December.  It makes me happy. :)

I also plan on reading the Jolly Postman by Allan Ahlberg and Janet Ahlberg.  It's a cute way to introduce students to letters and letter writing.  Then we will compose a letter as a class and label the parts of the letter.  If we have time, students will write a letter to someone.  I would say write one to Santa but not everyone in my class celebrates Christmas so we will write a letter to a friend or family member or even a teacher.

The rest of the month is devoted to learning about Holidays Around the World.  I would share my Holidays Around the World patterns if I could, but they are really old and I have no idea where they came from.  I inherited them from a teacher like 8 years ago.  Which reminds me that I graduated college 10 years ago in December.  Wow!  Where has the time went?

My class will meet our elf tomorrow.  I will have to let you know how it goes.

We will be learning about the letter B this week even though we already know all of our letter names and we have been working on the sounds forever.  It's just our phonics focus for the week.  We will be making a letter B Bear.  I'll post pictures after we make them which is looking like we will get to them on Friday.

The past few weeks my class has been doing calendar along with me in a calendar journal and they beg to do them.  I guess it's because we get a lot of math in with these journals.  Now, I didn't make my own journal.  I use Growing Kinders It's Calendar Time! Daily Calendar Book.  This has been perfect for my class!  I actually purchased it last school year but didn't get around to using it until this November.  We also started using an interactive journal before we went on our break.  I am going to just call it an interactive journal so we can put both reading and math in it.  I might even make a divider for reading and math.  They loved this too!

Well, if you haven't heard already, TPT is on sale tomorrow and Tuesday.  Everything in my store will be discounted 20% and if you use the TPT code CYBER, you will get an additional 10% off.  This totals to a 28% discount.  I did the math.  It really is 28%.  If you are wondering how, take 20% off of $10 and you will have $8.  Take an additional 10% off of that and it comes out to $7.20.  When you add the discount up, that was $2.80 off which is 28% of $10.  It made sense to me all of a sudden.  Lol

Happy Shopping!  Check back tomorrow to see what I bought from the sale.

The Winner is....

The winner of my rafflecopter giveaway is Mariann B.!  Congratulations Mariann!  I sent you an email with your prize.

Today is Sunday and I am busy working on plans for next week.  I hope it doesn't rain because tomorrow I plan on taking my class on the school's nature trail on a little nature scavenger hunt.  We are going to gather leaves some signs of fall.  I have some activities in mind for the leaves but you will have to find out later this week what that is.  I'm experimenting with a few ideas and I want to see how they turn out before I share.  It could be a total disaster.

This week we will be learning about the letter N and we will make a letter N hat from my Phonics Alphabet Hats pack.  You can get them here or here.  We will continue to use some of my math and literacy centers from my Firefighter Math and Literacy Pack.

We didn't get to use all of the literacy centers last week so we will be using all of them this week.  Students will practice beginning sounds, rhymes, and ABC order while practicing their letter formation.

In math, I will put the Clip It! Ten Frames back out along with the Trace, Build, Write.  I will show students how to do the Count and Graph and my aide will help students with patterns.  I plan to add the Build It! Ten Frames to the Clip It! Ten Frames center.  Click on one of the pictures above to see where you can get this pack.

This week in math we are going to talk about symmetry, patterns, and make a number book.  Well that's all I have.  I better get started on finishing up my plans.  My late afternoon nap put me behind. :)