Feelings

Wow what a week we have had so far! It is always those short weeks that really show you how important it is to be 100% prepared because something will always catch up with you.

Everyone seemed to settle back into the week today and we really got some fun stuff done.  The first day back after a long weekend is always the hardest to get everyone back on track, but my sweet friends till had a great day. 

This week we are learning all about the letter H and feelings. We started off the week by meeting our first Letter friend and learning all about him. His name is Mr. H and he has Happy hair.

Each week we color a picture of each letter person that we glue on a popsicle stick and turn into a puppet  for the children to take home and play with. 

We learned that Happy was a feeling by reading The Way I Feel and learning all about the different types of emotions. Next we read When Sophie Gets Angry, Really ,Really Angry and we talked about how it was ok to have all kinds of feelings, but what was important was how you handle hose feelings. 

Wednesday we read Glad Monster Sad Monster and we learned how colors can show and make us feel different emotions and then everyone made their very own colorful feelings monsters. 

Wednesday we watched a video of the story Chrysanthemum  and as we watched the story I held a red heart in my hand and every time one of the other children in the book said something unkind to or about Chrysanthemum I would crumple a little bit of the heart and every time someone said something kind I would unfold it. This left an uncrumpled yet very wrinkled heart and we talked about even though we say unkind things to others we can always say we are sorry, but even when we do say sorry it still leaves a little wrinkle in our friends heart. 

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Thursday we watched another video on our Smart Board of My Many Colored Days. Earlier in the week when we read Glad Monster Sad Monster we talked about the colors of each monster and this time we talked about how different colors could mean something different to different people. In Glad Monster Sad Monster we found that red meant Angry, but in My Many Colored Days red symbolized a horse kicking up their heels. It was fun to see what each student said how their color made them feel. 

For Jobs this week since we only had 4 days we only had 4 jobs. This meant one of our tables was spread between our other tables with 1 additional friend at each. I really hate short weeks and would rather just go to school because I feel like we miss out on so much when we miss. I also dislike short weeks because of 4 of everything I have to make 5 of everything, but you do what you gotta do to make everything flow as smoothly as possible.

Now that we have started our Letters we will make a craft out of the Uppercase and Lowercase letter each week. For our uppercase letter we made an H Horse.

For our Lowercase letter we made an h house.

Then the students rolled a Feelings Dice and then recreated that feeling on play doh mats. This was a great fine motor skill to get those little fingers moving.

Next I wanted to do some direction following and matching skills so each student got a baggy of colored feelings faces and they had to find that face on their sheet and color it in with the same color. 

Last, but not least I wanted to have the students make something we use in our classroom to help us when we don't know what to do with some of our feelings. n our classroom we have a Peace Table where friends can go to work out any issues or to sit and shill when they need to take a moment to regroup and think about making better choices. While they are at the Peace Table they can look at our Calm Down Bottles 

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which helps distract and give little hands something better to do. I thought it would be fun if each student had their own calm down bottle to take home and use when they needed a moment to calm down. Mrs. Douglas is our Master of Awesome crafts so I let her be in charge of this one especially since it involved glitter!

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So far it has been a great week and I am so proud of my friends for following directions and being great listeners. We are working on earning a Pajama Party right now which you know I live any excuse to wear my slippers an comfy pants to school. Man I love my job!

Happy Hump Day

Roxanne