Welcome back from all of the wonderful vacations we have been hearing about! We asked the children to write about what they did for their winter vacation. It sounds like everyone had a lot of fun, whether they stayed close to home or went to more exotic places.

went to the kids museum in Texas played in the snow went sledding on a tube went to Mexico and California went snowmobiling went skiing with new poles played with new Legos built an igloo got Hamtara made 2 snow forts skied went skiing at my house and twisted my leg got a new battery powered toy made a snow fort went to India

It has been so snowy and so cold! We begin the new year with a study of animals in the winter. We will be learning about migration, hibernation and the animals that stay active here in New England.

This is the bulletin board above the discovery table. The children can follow the tracks and find out which animal made them, or we can take the animal cards out and they figure out where they go.

We begin our study of animals in the winter by asking the children how they (people) get ready for winter. Some of their answers were:

put winter clothes on

buy snow clothes

buy new skis

shovel the path

put on warm clothes

get more food in

get wood for a fire

The next day we asked them how animals get ready for winter. These are some of the answers-

they gather food

keep warm

sleep inside caves

go somewhere warmer

squirrels gather acorns

gather hay to keep warm

some hibernate

bears find caves

deer find food

squirrels dig holes to live in

they grow thicker fur

We compared how people get ready for winter with what the animals do and found that some things are the same! Both gather food, grow warmer fur or wear warmer clothes, some people and animals migrate and some of us even almost hibernate!

We have been spending these first 2 weeks of January learning about migration and hibernation and will learn about the active animals next week. One of the questions we posed to the K-Kids was "Why do birds migrate?" We got some really good answers.

They want to go somewhere warm.

They can't survive in the snow.

They can't fly in the snow.

They can't find food.

There are too many birds and not enough food.

They can't dig underground to stay warm or find food.

They have to find new nesting grounds.

We played a game called "Why Migrate?". We pretended that we were all different kinds of birds, which ate all kinds of different food. Each child was given a "food" card. They had to decide, based on the kind of food they needed to find, whether they could stay or migrate. They put the food cards in the chart where they thought they belonged. Some of the food cards were pretty tricky- "insects under bark", "fish in a lake", "fish in a stream", etc. They did a great job figuring out whether or not they would be able to find the food they needed.

We also talked about other animals that migrate. For example, most reptiles and amphibians migrate down under the ground . We use the term migrate to mean to move to another place, not necessarily to fly south.

We have wonderful helpers from the seventh grade who help out at choice time. They have almost as much fun as the K-Kids!

We have been busy making many different projects to go with our winter studies. The children have made Ivory Snow snowmen, snowpeople finger puppets, paper plate penguins, penguin and snowman pins, snowman craftstick magnets, egg carton snowmen, paper plate and pom pom birds and turtles and whirly birds!

Although the weather has been bitterly cold, we did get outside at the beginning of the week. The kids were thrilled to be back on the playground with all the new heavy snow cover. The sliding hill is perfect now, although pretty fast and the play structures are presenting new challenges!

When it was too cold for outside time, we had an extra choice time inside. This was a big hit! The kids got to vote on whether we were going out and luckily for the teachers, voted to stay in when the temperatures didn't get out of the teens. They had a great time with the "junk box" and created some very creative masterpieces to take home. Another popular activity which emerged was indoor snow/skateboarding!

One activity that is continuing to evolve is their "tag sale". The kids decided to have a tag sale. They set up tables, chairs, displays and of course all their wares to sell. We saw children making crafts at the art tables to sell, and others making money to buy things with! They have carried this over to choice time this week and now have traveling tag sales to the B3s, B4s and even upstairs to the office. Any one who happens to wander through our classroom is besieged by our sales force. They will give you the money to buy their beautiful rings, bracelets, turtles, etc. or they will take credit! Mrs. Frantz (our admissions officer) paid for all of her purchases with lady bug stickers! As the cold and indoor recess continued yet another week the tag sale was set up again. This week we learned not to sell all the rainbow crayons upstairs ! Luckily a few of the customers brought some back, just in case we still needed them in our classroom!

We read the book Snowballs by Lois Ehlert. The children decided to try to gather their own "great stuff" and make beautiful snowmen too. Many of these gorgeous snow people have come back to school this week. The children are very proud of their beautiful creations and had a good time making them at home with their families!

Our other major project this week has been to learn about and to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day. We asked the children what they knew about Dr. King. They each had homework- to ask their moms and dads to tell them more about Martin Luther King Jr. and why he is so famous. By the end of the week we all had a good idea of why we celebrate Dr. King's birthday and knew a lot about his work. We read Martin's Big Words, a wonderful book, with beautiful illustrations. Our project was to create self-portraits with accurate skin color, eye color, etc. This brought up a discussion of how each of us has different color skin. We mixed many different "skin" colors on the back of our hands to try to get our exact color.

We have added new poems to our poetry pages which the children will be illustrating this month. One of our favorite poems from last month, A Chubby Little Snowman is in the pocket chart to read. Some of the children have chosen to make their own little chubby snowman to retell the poem.

We are working on sorting and classifying in math and have many new math workjobs in addition to our sorting. We will add more activities to our math page in the coming weeks.

Next week we will learn more about who makes these tracks!

We started our January quilt this week. These are a few of our handprint penguins. Our other squares are snowflakes. We talked about how many sides real snowflakes have (6) and that they are symmetrical. The kids worked with real pattern blocks to build their own snowflake, before using white paper pieces to glue down. They had 2 rules- they had to begin with a hexagon in the middle and it had to be symmetrical. They did a fantastic job! We were truly surprised at all of their wonderful and creative snowflakes. Each one is unique. The pictures below don't do them justice. Some of the designs are actually 3 dimensional!

This is our almost finished quilt.

We made mitten people to go on our door!

We painted our feet and made Kid Tracks!

One of our 7th grade helpers tickled toes with paint

and helped everyone walk carefully down the paper to leave tracks!

We also made puppets from Jan Brett's book, The Mitten

and made a few of our own animal track stamps.

These are the stamps we used to make our track story message.

The teachers made their stamps from rubber (tire tubes),

but craft foam worked much better for the kids to cut.

Our last writing project for Animals in the Winter was a way to summarize some of what we have learned. Each child had to draw one animal that hibernates, one that migrates, one that stays active and a picture of what they like to do in the winter. They also had to work independently on their writing. They did a fantastic job! They are becoming great writers, super illustrators and have learned a lot about animals in the winter!

These are a few of these wonderful papers!