We finally have a bit of snow to play with at recess. We made a few snowmen and even tried to sleep in the snow. We want more snow so we can make snow forts and slide down our big hill. If we have enough snow, we might even use the school's snow shoes.

The Kinderkids had so much fun making monsters, they were eager to try one more way. Using paper towel and toilet paper rolls and cut out pieces of paper, their monsters once again showed their creativity. The idea for this came from an article in Parent's magazine.You can find more information here.
These are just three examples of the Tube Monsters. Look on each child's blog for pictures of the other monsters.

We are reading lots of books about monsters. Two of our favorites are If You're a Monster and You Know It and There was an Old Monster. These books inspired us to make our own colorful monsters. We drew and cut shapes for the head, body, arms and legs and glued them together. Then we added faces, horns, tails and other things to make our monsters look great.

After reading The Monster's Party by Joy Cowley, we decided to tell about things that our monsters can do. We tried to think of different things the monsters could do. We hope you like our monsters and like our ideas for what they can do.

We have added one more routine to our Daily 5 work. It is called Listen to Reading. We have lots of stories on iPods and on the computer to choose from. We use Tumble Books on the computer. We can hear the words and follow along when we watch the screen. With the stories on the iPods, we listen to the words and turn the pages of our books when we hear the signal. Listening to Reading is something else that helps us become better readers.

We are learning to write stories about what we know and things we do. We wrote this message together during our writing time. It is about the monarch butterflies we have in our room.

We had some monarch caterpillars. The butterflies lay eggs on leaves and they hatch into caterpillars. They eat leaves. They eat milkweed.

                     The caterpillars go into a chrysalis. First they turn into a J.The chrysalis is green and then it turns black. When it is black that means it's almost ready to hatch the butterfly. When the butterflies come out, they hang upside down to pump up their wings. When they hatch their wings are all crumpled up and they have a fat body. If the butterfly is a boy, it has a black dot on each wing. The girls don't have any black dots.

                 We let the butterflies go. A butterfly flew on to Shaun's pants and then flew to Max's shirt. Some of the kids got to hold the butterfly. The butterflies are going to fly to Mexico.The butterflies have to go there because it is too cold here in Deerfield. They rest in trees. You can watch them in the sky. The butterflies will come back. When they come back we might find them again. We put tags on the butterflies to help the scientists know where they came from.

Every day after snack, the KinderKids do Me Moves . Some people don't know about Me Moves so we thought we would show you what we do. We watch the DVD on our white board and follow the motions. Some of the KinderKids like to do Me Moves on top of our Bilibo chairs and keep their balance. Me Moves helps us relax and get ready for our work. We do math after Me Moves.

We even teach our families how to do MeMoves.