Happy Thanksgiving from The Giraffes!

We have had so much fun learning about Thanksgiving and celebrating all that we have to be thankful for. We began our Thanksgiving celebrations by sharing our disguised turkey projects with one another. We had some amazing ideas for disguising our Toms and Tinas!

One of the giraffes even matched their turkey to make their disguise extra tricky!! 

2H and 2A also had some great ideas, and all of our turkeys are on display in the hallway. 

We also finished our "I Am Thankful" poems, which described who, what, when, where, and why we are thankful. It was a lot of fun making our designs on the coffee filters and watching the colors mix together when we sprayed them with water! 

On Friday, one of our amazing parent volunteers helped us make some hand print Mayflower paintings! We've been learning a lot about the Mayflower as we've learned about the history of Thanksgiving, and we know the Pilgrims used the ship as their home both for their journey to America and for their first several months in America because they had to build their homes!

We've also been working to create a menu to go along with our Thanksgiving Feast! We shared all of the delicious foods and wonderful traditions our families have for Thanksgiving, and we created menus to share with our families to help them decide which foods they'd like to add to their plates :)

We also included some great Thanksgiving facts we've been learning over the last few weeks, including some facts we learned from our trip to Strawbery Banke! 

I also wanted to tell you about a very small but wonderful part of our day today: we went around our circle at morning meeting to tell each other one thing about the people sitting beside us that we were thankful for, and everyone thought of such kind and thoughtful things to say about their classmates. No one even had to hesitate to think of something that they truly appreciated. We were thankful for each other's kindness, humor, helpfulness, and most importantly, for each other's friendship. I was teary eyed by the time we got around the circle!

I am so incredibly grateful to be your children's teacher. They work so hard to learn new skills and they make so much growth in such a short amount of time, but what makes me most proud to be their teacher is the time and effort they put into one another. Their compassion continues to amaze me each and every day. You should be so proud of your children and the amazing work you have done as their parents.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Congratulations!

One of our very own giraffes took the courage to enter the NHPTV Writers Contest and received an Outstanding Achievement Award for her poem "I Am Thankful". We are so proud of your bravery to put your work out there, Marie! Way to go! 

Marie's sister also received an Outstanding Achievement Award for her her poem "Peace" 

Great job, Meaghan! 

Silver Dollar Word Search

This week, we've been working on "showing" in our poems rather than "telling", so we've been on the hunt for "Silver Dollar" words that will add lots of detail to our poems.

Ms. Riley's former teacher Ms, Aldrich has done a lot of traveling, and in her travels she found dozens of interesting shells, rocks, and pieces of coral from all over the world! She gave lots of these shells to Ms. Riley to use in her classroom, so we started our search by writing down all the words we could think of to describe the items in this very cool collection. 

We looked, felt, smelled, and even listened to the different shells, rocks, and coral and rotated to each of the tables to write down the silver dollar words that came to mind

We've also been able to find some descriptive words to use with our plants in class--check out our greenhouse beanstalks!

We used lots of these great descriptive words in our Many Color Days-inspired poems, which we will turn into books! 

At the end of the month, we invite our friends and family to join us on May 24th at 12:45 pm for a Sidewalk Shel-ebration! Weather permitting, we will be outside publishing our poems "where the sidewalk ends" using chalk and we will also be reciting some Shel Silverstein poems as well as poems we've written ourselves! We will debut the second annual Giraffe Book of Poetry. We hope to see you there! 

Turkey Trot

The Giraffe class has been filled with all sorts of Turkey fun over the past week! Not only did we bring in the rest of our disguised Tom and Tina Turkeys, but we also made coffee filter turkeys to go with our Thanksgiving Poems as well as some paper tube turkeys with our 5D Reading Buddies!

Here are some more of the Tom and Tina Turkeys that came in last week! I mean...turkeys? No turkeys here....

These are all the disguises created by the Giraffes, Owls, and Kangaroos! 

It was so fun and easy making our tie-dye coffee filter feathers for our Thankful Turkeys! All we had to do was color the filters with markers and spray them with water. We loved watching the colors disperse throughout the filter! 

To write our Thankful Poems, we thought about who we were thankful for, what we were thankful for, where we were thankful for, and why we were thankful. We then traced our feet to make the rest of our turkeys and added some eyes, a beak, and a waddle! Here are some of the beautiful turkeys and poems we created:

This week, we headed up to 5D to make some Paper Tube Turkeys with our Reading Buddies! It was really neat to see how you could make a turkey out of a paper tube and just a few snips!

We also really enjoyed checking out their Thankful trees that they made. What an awesome idea!

Happy Thanksgiving to all of the friends and family of the Giraffe Class! Giraffes, I am so thankful to be your teacher. To have the opportunity to help you grow and learn every day is truly a dream come true. Thank you for bringing me so much happiness through our smiles, laughs, and for just being you :) 

Love Always,

Ms. Riley