Disguised Turkey Project

Dear Families,

It’s time to have fun creating a very unusual bird. As a family, disguise Tom or Tina Turkey so that he or she won’t be eaten for Thanksgiving! You may choose to dress your turkey as a doctor, farmer, princess, peacock, police officer---the possibilities are endless! Use any & all materials you have at home (bright colors, scrap paper, cotton balls, feathers, buttons, and scraps of fabric all make great disguises!) Please help us save these turkeys!! Your Tom or Tina Turkey in disguise is due back by Wednesday, November 15th.  You may send your turkey back early if you would like. When your turkey is incognito, he or she can ‘hide out’ in our classroom!

Happy Turkey Dressing,

Ms. Riley

Want to see more turkey examples? Click here! 

Writing Folders

Hello, Giraffe Families!

Next week, we are going to be personalizing our Writer’s Workshop folders, which will help us generate ideas for our stories throughout the year. I am going to have magazines, brochures, and printed pictures for students to use, but you child is also welcome to bring in or email their own personal pictures of their families, friends, pets, and places they’ve been to in the last year or so to add at school. We will be creating our folders on Thursday, September 14th, so if your child would like to bring in pictures to add to their folder, you can send them in on or before that date. 

To give you an idea of what these folders will look like, here are some examples of my own writing folders over the last few years:

I am very excited to see how everyone chooses to personalize their folders. Not only will it help us to support our writing, but it will also allow us all to get to know each other on a deeper level ☺Enjoy your weekend!

100th Day Letter Project

Greetings, Families!

It is hard to believe we are more than half way through our school year! That being said, our 100th Day of School is just around the corner. We will celebrate this day in class with lots of special activities, and we will also celebrate by creating a project at home as part of this week and next week’s homework.

Each student will be assigned to create a letter or a number. When we put all of our letters together, we will spell out “100 Days of Learning”  Each letter/number/symbol should have 100 items on it. These items can be anything from small drawings to stickers, candies, googly eyes, pasta, feathers, etc-- the possibilities are endless!

Students will come home with a directions sheet including their letter/number assignment as well as a piece of oak tag paper. When making the letter/number, be sure to make it as close to the size of the oak tag paper as possible, as shown above. We talked about drawing our letter in pencil first and making sure our items will fit on it before cutting out the letter and gluing our items down. 

Letters/numbers will be due back to school by Wednesday, February 1st.

Here are the letters we created in the past:

After we got to see these pictures in class, we brainstormed a list of what items we might like to use to make our letters:

• Hearts
• Stickers
• Glue Dots
• Legos
• Minecraft Figures
• Words
• Googly Eyes
• Squares
• Shapes
• Pom Poms
• Marshmallows
• Tsum Tsum Stickers
• Mints
• Go Noodle Stickers
• Gumballs
• Gum Squares
• Emojis
• Grass
• Letters
• Keychains
• Wheels
• Pasta
• Pennies
• Little People
• M&Ms
• Skittles
• American Flags
• Beads
• Popsicle Sticks
• Toothpicks
• Perler Beads
• Cereal
• Sequins/Glitter
• Bobby Pins
• Mike and Ikes
• Life Savers
• Nerds
• Giraffes
• Candy Wrappers
• Star Wars Pictures
• Leaves
• Flowers
• Jelly Beans

The possibilities are endless! Have fun!

Incognito Turkeys

Dear Families,

It’s time to have fun creating a very unusual bird. As a family, disguise Tom or Tina Turkey so that he or she won’t be eaten for Thanksgiving! You may choose to dress your turkey as a doctor, farmer, princess, peacock, police officer---the possibilities are endless! Use any & all materials you have at home (bright colors, scrap paper, cotton balls, feathers, buttons, and scraps of fabric all make great disguises!) Please help us save these turkeys!! Your Tom or Tina Turkey in disguise is due back by Monday, Nov. 14th.  You may send your turkey back early if you would like. When your turkey is incognito, he or she can ‘hide out’ in our classroom!

Happy Turkey Dressing,

Ms. Riley

Here are a few of the turkeys we made last year!

Character Pumpkins!

Hello, Families!

To celebrate wrapping up our first reading unit of the year and the upcoming holiday, we are going to make Book Character Pumpkins to put on display for our Halloween celebration on the 28th!

At home, please help your child decide on which book character they would like to create using their pumpkin. Then, make a plan on the pumpkin plan sheet and send the plan sheet back to school along with one small pumpkin for your child to decorate. We have lots of paint and paper at school, but your child is also welcome to bring in any other accessories they would like to add! We will create our pumpkins on Thursday, October 27th so they are ready to go on the 28th!

Please have your pumpkin plan sheets along with your pumpkins back to class by Wednesday, October 26th. If you are unable to get a pumpkin by this time, please let me know and I will be sure to bring extras!

All family members are invited to join us for a Halloween Celebration on Friday, October 28th at 1:00 pm. We will have our character pumpkins on display, we will have a few Halloween Treats, and we will play some Halloween games!

Warmly,

Ms. Riley

Here are some ideas to get your creative juices flowing:

Turkeys? No Turkeys Here....

All week long, 2R has been flooded with terrific turkeys! I mean.... football players, superheroes, princesses, cheerleaders, skateboarders, and FedEx delivery men! Here are a few of the friends who have joined our gaggle so far, we can't wait to see the rest:

Remember, our disguised Toms and Tinas are due back by tomorrow! 

Turkey Trouble!

It’s time to have fun creating a very unusual bird. As a family, disguise Tom or Tina Turkey so that he or she won’t be eaten for Thanksgiving! You may choose to dress your turkey as a doctor, farmer, princess, dragon, police officer---anything you can imagine! We've already brainstormed a great list of ideas in our classroom. Use any & all materials you have at home (bright colors, scrap paper, cotton balls, feathers, buttons, and scraps of fabric all make great disguises!) Please help us save these turkeys!! Your Tom or Tina Turkey in disguise is due back by Monday, November 16th. You may send your turkey back early if you would like. When your turkey is incognito, he or she can ‘hideout’ in our classroom!

Mrs. Healey did this project last year, and she has invited us to join in on the fun! Pictured above are a few of the disguises they came up with for Thanksgiving 2014. To see some more examples of past turkeys, you can visit her classroom blog! 

Knuffle Bunny Project: A Look at Stratham

Did you know that author Mo Willems used real pictures from his community in his illustrations for his book Knuffle Bunny? He took real black and white photos from his neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY to use in his story about his family!

Since we too will begin to focus on learning about our own community and what we can do to support it, we are going to make our own Knuffle Bunny-inspired illustrations of our town of Stratham. Please take a photo of any place in our town where you spend lots of your time. It could be a photo outside of our school, Stratham Hill Park, The Wiggin Memorial Library, or even right in your own neighborhood! Please e-mail these photos to Ms. Riley by Monday, November 9th. We will print out our photos and make our illustrations at school! If you are able to make your photos black and white before sending them, it would be much appreciated. But no worries if you cannot, we can certainly help!

   

We Are 100 Days Smarter!!

That's right!! After some minor setbacks due to our incredibly high number of snow days over the last few weeks, our 100th Day of School has finally arrived! Which means we finally get to reveal our 100th Day Banner. Yahoo!! Here are our awesome creations up close:

We started our day off by entering into our 100th Day Door Portal. We could feel the excitement of reaching three digits as soon as we walked in!

As part of the 100th Day packet we've been working on, we wanted to see how many times we could do certain activities in 100 seconds (or, as we discovered, 1 minute and 40 seconds). Between yesterday and today, we practiced writing our names, doing jumping jacks, hopping up and down and all around, and writing the number 100 as many times as we could before time ran out. 

We also used the digits in 100 to create some very interesting pictures. Can you spot the disguised digits in these works of art? 

One of our absolute favorite activities of the day (as well as Mr. Fosher's!) was when we got to take a look at ourselves at age 100. We used an app on the iPad to see what we might look like when we get older. We don't think there has ever been so much laughter in the 1/2 hallway at SMS!  

Call us old-fashioned!! 

Overall, we had a fantastic 100th Day of School. We've accomplished so much in the last 100 days and we can't wait to see what is in store for the next 80 :)