February Celebrations and Writing Fun

February is full of different celebrations. Groundhog Day is the start of these events. In our part of the world, the groundhog forecast was for an early spring. So far it is definitely seeming to be so. We have had beautiful sunny days and mild temperatures. Flowers are starting to bloom and the campfires are becoming a regular occurrence on the beaches.
At school, we took some time to look at what the groundhog predictions were and then we played some sight word bingo with the groundhog sight word cards and the spring nouns cards.

My kids love playing games and I try to use a variety of themes to reinforce the same skills or concepts. I have created many different themed Dolch sight words sets so it never becomes "old" for them.
These sight words and bingo cards are available in my TPT store.

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I combined the Spring Dolch nouns with the Groundhog Dolch sight words to do sentence building. It was a hit.
It was interesting to see all the different ways they used the cards that were given to them. I wish I had taken more pictures so I could share them with you.
After the sentence games, I handed out the noun bingo cards and the sight word bingo cards and they played with them.

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Valentine's Day is another big celebration in February. We didn't have much time to devote to this because of other activities happening, but we did spend the morning doing Valentine themed activities. Of course, handing out and receiving valentines is a big part of the celebration, so we had to have a special place to put them.
Buddy classes combined to make these special bags, and they were so cute, a colleague and I had to join in on the fun. Each class did them a bit differently, but it was fun to see these frogs hanging around in most of the primary classrooms in the school.
We also had a school wide skating day. Our class went in the afternoon, so it was a bit different doing our valentines activities in the morning instead of the afternoon.

Family Day is a fairly new holiday for us in BC. We had February 9 off to spend with families. It was nice to take a break and just enjoy family and friends for a day.

Writing is a big focus at this time of the year. We are currently working on writing stories and developing writing skills. Here are some samples of what we have been doing.

We have been learning about the parts of speech. We decided to practice using adjectives, nouns, and verbs to create silly sentences.
Each child chose 5 adjectives, 5 nouns, and 5 verbs. I compiled them and typed them out on individual strips. Then each child was given random adjectives, nouns, and verbs. They illustrated each word and here are the results. We will be putting them together as a flip book after they come off the bulletin board.

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Coming up with descriptive language that is precise and creates images is tricky for young kids. I decided to try and get them to come up with single words that would describe things. Then we combined them to create poems. They were excited to see the diamond shape of the poems.  The kids enjoyed trying these out after we did some class examples.  Here are some of our "diamond" poems.

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Here is a picture of my set from home.

The Lunar New Year was the focus on Thursday afternoon. This is a big celebration in many parts of the world. Here in North America, most people think of it as Chinese New Year, but because my daughter-in-law is Korean, I prefer to think of it in broader terms. The Lunar New Year is an important celebration there too.
A few years ago, I learned to play a game that is played by many families in Korea. It is called "yut". When I was in Korea, I bought some sets for my class. We played the game on Thursday afternoon. My grandson knows the game well and he was able to help the other students with the rules. I wish I had pictures, but I was busy playing with a couple of students.

Well, I hope you enjoyed my update for February. March is going to be a blur of excitement as well. We will be celebrating 100s day, St. Patrick's Day, spring, and also doing our student-led conferences.