Mrs. Garrabrant's Classroom: New Digging Area, Preparing for Friendship Feast, and More!

We had a very busy short week this week! Thank you to everyone for coming to conferences. The students really enjoyed sharing their hard work with you all! It really helps me learn more about my students, their families, and their lives.

A couple of weeks ago, the students wanted to see what happened if we tried to grow our own pumpkin seed. We put it in a cup and watched the the students were very excited to watch the seed break open. The roots started growing and and a sprout came out and begin to grow up.

Our sprout has gotten so big that I had to put it in a big crate. Since we learned the life cycle of a pumpkin, we know that next it will grow a vine! The students are anxiously awaiting the sprout to start growing a vine.

Mrs. Myers' son built a new digging area with pea gravel on our playground for his project in order to earn his Eagle Scouts with a digging claw inside of it. The students were very excited to explore this area. They really enjoyed it! We had to practice patience when waiting our turn to work with the digging claw.

We worked really hard in writing this week drawing stories and writing about what we are thankful for. We focused on the difference between needs and wants and how we should really appreciate and be thankful for the things that we truly need in our lives. We shared these stories as well as read our color brown book that we earned with our preschool reading buddies on Friday.

We learned a short song about being thankful that we will sing for our Friendship Feast next week. The song also has sign language to go along with it. We practiced singing our song to our preschool reading buddies as well. We also taught the song to Mrs. Myers students to prepare for our Friendship Feast. We will be practicing our friendship song next week and then will be singing it before we begin our Friendship Feast on Thursday.

The students also decided that they wanted to make a Friendship Tree to display at our feast. First we had to paint our tree. All of the students helped work on it and it turned out awesome! Then we had to make the leaves.

They wanted to make their hand prints be the leaves on our tree. So we talked about what colors leaves can be and the students chose which color they wanted to make their hand print leaf.

They traced their hand on the paper. The students were quick to help each other as this was a very difficult task. It took a lot of fine motor skills in their hands to keep their fingers still as they were tracing them, and tracing as close to their fingers as possible to make it accurate.

Then they had to cut their hand print out. This was also difficult because they had to stay on the lines and not cut any of the fingers off even though they are so close together. This even took a few tries for some of the students but they were all persistent, encouraging and helpful to one another until we all had our hand prints cut out for our tree. We then wrote what we are thankful for on our hands and we will be attaching them to our tree next week!

We also finished our brown mosaic this week, we just have to make the label for it.

Then we learned our last color word song, pink!

These are the letter books that we have worked on this week when we are practicing the lowercase letters along with our brown color word book that the students earned this week.

We have added the lowercase letters that we have learned so far to the matching letter cards. These are the lowercase letters that we have learned so far. Ask your child to tell you the lowercase and uppercase letters that we have learned so far. We will continue to work on learning the rest of the lowercase letters.