Week 2

I hope everyone had a nice and relaxing Labor Day weekend. It was nice to have an extra day of rest. This week, we were very busy, trying to build our daily routines and procedures. 

We continue to write in our journals daily. This week, we read The Best Story Ever and we learned that the best stories are the ones that come from our hearts. We are trying to brainstorm ideas and draw the pictures. Our writing should match the picture.

We worked on building our stamina with our writing. We read a story about Dex, who is a dog, that continues to persevere in becoming a super dog, in spite of being a wiener dog. Even when things were difficult and hard, he never gave up.

We started our phonemic awareness activities. We spend about 10-15 minutes a day on rhyming words, initial and final sounds, compound words and listening skills. We are using lots of hand motions to take words and sounds apart and put them back together again.

We also started our Kinder Phonics. In this program, the students are introduced to one letter a day for 26 days. We then go back over the letters again spending more time on each. We learned the letters Aa, Bb, Cc and Dd this week. I somehow forgot to take a picture of letter Aa. Each letter corresponds with an action that helps the students remember the sound that goes with that letter. They also correspond to the Leap Frog video, so we watch short clips of each letter as we are learning them. For letter Aa, the action is fearful Aa. The students bring their hands to their cheeks as they act scared and make the /a/ sound.

For letter Bb, the students play the bongos as they make the /b/ sounds.

For letter Cc, the students crisscross their arms and shiver like they are /c/ /c/ /c/ cold.

For letter Dd the students play the drum as they are making the /d/ sound.

 

We started our poetry journal and put our first poem in.

 

We read the book Animals in the Park and talked about the letters in this ABC book. We also paid close attention to Mrs. Langham as she uses her fingers to track each word as she says it.

We practiced tracking words and pictures this week by touching each dot underneath the picture or word.

 

We also have a couple of paper books that we have put in our book boxes to practice 1:1 tracking.

 

We began our first part of Daily 5 which is called Read to Self. We listed the expectations of Read to Self which include: read quietly, stay in one spot and get started right away and read the whole time. We practiced Read to Self several times and we are working on building our stamina. Once we are able to establish routines and work independently, we will be able to add in more centers to our rotation.

 

 Another part of our weekly Language Arts block will be close reading. Each week, I will focus on one book. The book is read once each day with a different focus on the book each day. This week, we read Little Smudge. The first day is a cold read of the book for enjoyment. We created a circle map of what it means to be a friend.

 

The next day, we focused on the vocabulary. We chose 5 unfamiliar words from the story and we learned their meaning. It was amazing to see how quickly they learned these new vocabulary words and brought them to my attention each time we read the book. 

 

A goal of close reading is to encourage talk amongst the students. Rather than have students raise their hand to answer questions, I want them to be actively involved. We have something that we call "Turn and Talk". The students are paired up and they turn and talk to their partner to discuss questions about the book and share what they learned with the class. That way everyone is answering the question instead of just a few. We discussed the author's purpose for the book and what lesson we learned from the story.

Another fun book that we read this week was Little Pea. This funny story was about a little pea who had to eat all of his candy for supper so he could have spinach for dessert. 

In math, we began learning about numbers. I wish I had taken pictures during this time. The students were so engaged. We learned little poems to help us write our numbers and the students practiced writing them on whiteboards with dry erase markers. It was so much fun.

We practiced using unifix cubes to represent specific numbers. Mrs. Langham was put a number up on the overhead and we would make a number train with that many unifix cubes. We did a little bit of free exploration before we began using them to represent a given quantity.

The next day, we did the opposite. Mrs. Langham made a number train and we held up the number that to represent the number train.

We were introduced to ten frames. This tool will help us with counting and later on with addition and subtraction. The goal is for students to be able to subitize (instantly recognize the number by looking at the tens frame). We practiced matching the ten frame to the number and then some of us played memory using ten frames and making matches with numbers.

In science, we learned about the jobs of scientists. We drew in our science journals what kind of scientist we wanted to be.

A scientist uses many different tools. We distinguished the difference between tools and toys with a sort that we did in our science journals. Some of us even explored science tools during center time.

We enjoyed our center time too.

We had a bit of a disappointment today. The children have been looking forward to Hill Harbor and today was suppose to be our first day going. We went with anticipation of playing, but it was way too muddy due to the rain/downpour we had yesterday during dismissal time. We did have an orientation and had fun learning about Hill Harbor. Hopefully the weather will cooperate. We will go to Hill Harbor first thing on Friday mornings.

 

Next week we have some more new things planned too. We will go to the library on Tuesday. The students will go to the library weekly for story time and we will eventually get to check out books. Mrs. Pustka is not quite ready for us to check out next week. Library books are due every two weeks, but I encourage you to return the books each week so that your child will get to check out a new book each week during library time.

We will also begin going to the computer lab on Thursdays. I know the class is very excited to go there.