Mittens and Hot Chocolate

I could sure use some hot chocolate today! It is cold and blustery here – why do I live here again?
Last week we had some fun with hot cocoa and read many different versions of The Mitten.
Here is a glimpse into our room:
Well, I thought of took pictures of our hot chocolate science experiment, but I guess I forgot!  We made predictions about what we think will happen if we put hot chocolate powder in hot water and in cold water.  The children drew their predictions in the reader’s response journal:

It was so fun to listen to them talk and discuss with each other would might happen.  They all have prior experience drinking hot chocolate, but most have never made hot chocolate for themselves.  Many of the colored in the water red for hot and blue for cold! Adorable!
Then, I boiled up some water (I brought in my electric teapot), and put powder in both the hot and cold water.  I put the cups under the document camera so the kids could really see what happened.  We observed and charted our observations.  We watched for a few minutes and decided that hot chocolate powder dissolves better in warm water

(Can you see the chunks of hot chocolate powder in the cold cup?  Great observations!)
Staying on the hot chocolate theme, I introduced them to the teen number missing number game. They LOVE this game.  Most kids choose it when they are done with their math centers.  Not sure if it’s because of the dry erase markers or what!?  Doesn’t matter to me, they are having fun practicing sequencing numbers!

And we played our missing marshmallow sight word game almost every day!!  The kids even asked to play this game during free choice time.  It’s so fun to watch them figure out who is going to be in “charge” and hide the marshmallow!

To add a little bit more to the game, at the end of the week, the children got white boards and markers and wrote the words as they were guessed.  So, instead of turning them over, they had to write the word on their board.  They had to re-read the words on their boards to figure out which word to guess.

On to the mittens….. here is the cover of our response book.  I think I cut the mitten thumb a bit too big – looks kind of awkward! oops

We read a different version of The Mitten every day and made a list of the characters in each one. The children were excited to hear the story to pick out which characters were different and which were the same!

On Thursday, we read this book:

and wrote about text-to-text connections:

And on Friday, we read this book:

and talked about text-to-self connections:

And math problem solving for the week: