Singing in the Open Area

 One of our Brooksbank Christmas traditions is that the classes in the open area (and us) get together in the mornings of the week before the break and sing Christmas carols together. Today was our first day and we enjoyed it! Some kids (those who volunteer) get the chance to play some instruments at the front while the rest of us sing. Here's a look at our singing time this morning.

The kids did amazingly well at the concert rehearsal this afternoon. They sounded fantastic! I am so excited to see how it goes tonight! Please have your child at our classroom at 5:45 and then make sure to head into the gym (parents) to get a seat for the performance. Looking forward to seeing you all later this evening.

It's beginning to look a lot like......

We finished our art project from yesterday. They are currently drying on the ring rack so I can't show your the finished product. But I can tell you they are beautiful.

We used white runny glue today and lots of sparkly jewels. 

We also started learning how to build and read bar graphs today. The question of the day was "do you like summer, fall, or winter best?". We also learned about initials and tried to figure out what our initials were so that we could add our data to the graph. The kids figured out how graphs work pretty quickly and we talked about how you can take a short cut (you don't have to count all the squares on the graph to get the information you need). Fun!

Cutting and Ordering

We worked on some cutting today....lots of cutting!

We cut these strips and then cut off the pieces with the Xs on them.

Then we ordered the strips from longest to shortest and glued them down on to a big piece of paper. 

You will have to wait until tomorrow to see what they turn into!

We had lots of tired kids today. I'm sure the rainy weather will help everyone have a quiet night at home tonight! 

This rain causes us to have lots of extra clothing and footwear at our coat hooks. It is becoming increasingly difficult to keep track of everyone's belongings. PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE make sure that your child's items are labeled and that any extra clothing/footwear is kept in a large enough and sturdy enough bag on the coat hook. Please also label the bag. I am spending many minutes a day trying to reconnect kids with belongings. Some kids are also having a tough time fitting everything into their backpacks. If your child's extra clothes are kept in the backpack, please consider leaving them in a bag on his/her hook to free up space for lunch bags etc. Thanks so much for your help with this. 

Find the Snowball

Some wonderful morning building.

We played "find the snowball" today. Each pair of kids was given 2 or 3 little cups with different letters written on them and one snowball (cotton ball). One partner hid the snowball under one cup and the other partner had to guess which letter it was hiding under. Guessers are not allowed to point to cups and are not allowed to lift cup to look, they have to name the letter. One person hides the snowball twice and then the other person becomes the hider. We only had a few minutes to play today, but next time, we will rotate the cups so that we are practicing more than 3 letters.

Here's our finished tree. We cut out "lightbulbs" today and the tree looks sparkling and bright!

Hope to see you later tonight at the Jingle Mingle!