Weekly Poem 8/26!

Below is a video of the class reading our second poem, Little Ball. I was not able to get video taken during the performance today, but I was able to get video when we read it as a class after cutting and gluing the poem into our poetry journals. As you can see, the class does not read it all together right now. As the year goes on and their reading fluency improves, you will see that improve as well!



1st Day of Choice!

Today we practiced choosing which Daily 5 choice each student wanted to go to for their first round. I have only introduced Work on Writing and Read to Someone. Most of the students picked writing first and went to read to self as their second choice. I am excited when we have all 5 choices up and running!

Name Painting!

We had painting fun this afternoon! Each student practiced tracing his/her first name by going from the sky to the ground with their water colors. We will start writing our names on a sign in page every morning next week!

Math Practice!

During math time today we practiced counting, recognizing numbers and creating shapes on geo boards. The class first used the number pans with their table group. They took turns picking a number and moving it into the middle. Then, they would have their partner name the number they picked. After a quick mini-lesson on shapes, the class went out with their parnters again and made shapes using a rubberband and the geo board. They made triangles, squares and rectangles as well as creating a new shape and using their imaginiation to come up with what the shape looked like. There were several trucks (without wheels), houses, stop signs and even a batman!

Work on Writing!

Today I launched the Work on Writing portion of Daily 5. I have to admit I was a little nervous to do this knowing most of my students are not familiar with writing the letters of the alphabet and having them get started on writing independently in the second week of school! We started by creating our I-Chart for Work on Writing. The class came up with what they thought their job would be during writing. We did this by thinking about their job during Read to Self and put it in writing terms. I then modeled how to draw a picture using an idea and shapes. I also modeled where to go in the room for Work on Writing. The students have a few options. They can either go back to their seats and use the crayons/colored pencils there or grab four crayons, a pencil and a clipboard and find a spot in the room. Each student had one sheet of writing paper to practice today. Eventually we will work on writing in our journals. I hope to start the journals sometime next week. We charted our stamina for two rounds today. We first made it a minute and a half and our second round we made it to 4 minutes.