The girls really enjoyed all the excitement of Thanksgiving and everything they learned throughout this month.
The themes for this month centered on building on our phonics and phonemic awareness skills; colors - recognition of the word and writing the color words; scarecrows; Pilgrims and Native Americans (the first Thanksgiving); and turkey time fun.
Lessons included shared readings from big books pertaining to the themes; stories, songs, and even some poetry! The girls strengthened their skills in sentence structure, as well as their reading readiness skills through more of the fun little books we work on in class. They were encouraged to continue sounding out and s-t-r-e-t-c-h-i-n-g out words to hear the sounds when reading and writing. We continue to build on our inventive/phonetic spelling as we write.
We discussed words that we encountered this month and their meanings through the context in which they were used: examples include: crops; Pilgrims; Plymouth; chores; churn butter; muck a garden; Native Americans; canoes; teepee; longhouse; wetu; wigwam; cornucopia; pompions; wadddle; etc.
We focused on strengthening our abilities to recognize and write color words through a fun study on scarecrow colors. We reviewed recognition of the color words red, yellow, green, and orange. The girls learned how to look beyond the first letter to identify blue, black, brown, purple and pink. They enjoyed making the little books on scarecrows and colors, and even designing their own scarecrow to write about too!
The girls enjoyed making patterned Indian corn; writing about the things they were thankful for; and learning all about the Pilgrims and Native Americans and the first Thanksgiving.
Math topics covered this month included a continuation of numbers from ten and higher; shapes; making more intricate patterns; and interpreting graphs.
Science topics covered this month included experimenting with mixing primary colors to get secondary ones; learning how corn grows and all the things we can make from corn; learning about many of the foods that were eaten at the first Thanksgiving and comparing it to what WE eat at our Thanksgiving table; and facts about turkeys.
Social Studies topics covered this month included an in depth study on Pilgrims and Native Americans: How they lived and made use of the land and its resources; types of houses they lived in compared to ours; chores the children had; tools they used; things they packed - life on the Mayflower; struggles the Pilgrims had and how the Native Americans helped to teach them; the story of the first Thanksgiving.
