Spider Sentences!

This week, we learned all about spiders. We watched several video clips and looked at pictures from National Geographic for Kids. We then completed our own sentences about where we have seen spiders before and shared them with the class.

Poem 10/21/2011

We read our poem two times this morning. The first time we read it using our reading voices, the second time we did the motions that went along with the poem! Great job to all of my performers!

"Tune In" to Interesting Words Review

One of my CAFE mini-lessons today was a review lesson from a previous strategy we learned a couple of weeks ago. We read the poem Kitchen Sink-Song from our reading series Big Book of Poems and Rhymes. In this poem, there were several interesting words. We discussed after reading the poem and listing the interesting words we heard, that the words were describings sounds that are made by the various objects in the poem. The words we found today were "plink, plip, pop, gurgle and trinkle".

Counselor Visit

This morning our school counselor came in and talked with the class about her job and how she helps students. She passed out trains to each student that had a feeling word on it. We went through each feeling word and talked about what it meant and came up with situations where you might feel like those words. After putting the trains up next to the words on the board, she passed out puzzle pieces to the students to put togehter on a puzzle of a person. The class enjoyed getting to meet our counselor and hear all about her job here at our school!

Math Mini-Lesson

Our first mini-lesson during Daily 5 Math today practiced our numbers and shapes. I wrote numbers and shapes on a beach ball. We rolled the beach ball back and forth to each other. Wherever our thumb landed, we had to say the shape or number it landed on or the one that was closest.

Daily 5 Math-Videos

    Below are two videos of two of my students during the choice "Number Work" and "Math with Someone" during our Daily 5 Math time. These are two of their three options they have during Daily 5 Math. They can also choose Math by Myself.

    The first video is of one student using the number strips/clips. Each close pin has stamps on it that corresponds to a number on the strip. The student is to count the number of stamps and then place it on the number strip of the correct number. When they have all clips on the strip, they flip the strip over and there are numbers on the back of the clip to check their work.

    The second video is of two students using their number pan to create numbers. Each student pulls a number down and has the other one guess it. We are only working on numbers 0-20 right now. As a challenge, they can create any numbers 11-20! If their partner guesses the number incorrectly the first student tells them to "try again" and after the second try might have to tell their partner what number they created. Once they get the number correct, he/she tells their partner "good job".

 

Middle Sounds

During our second mini-lesson today, I introduced middle sounds. I placed four CVC words without their middle sound on the board. I placed five possible middle sounds below the words. I began by stating each word to the class emphasizing the beginning, middle and end sounds. One student came up at a time and placed the letter they believed to be the middle sound for the word and we read it as a class to check their work. The class did a great job with this. I have been working on this skill in several of my strategy groups already this year.

Sight Word "we"

After learning our new sight word "we" today, I put several letters scattered around on the board. I had one student come up and build our new sight word using the letters available on the board. I am starting out by only working with one sight word at a time, but will eventually add more sight words to build together.

New Theme!

To introduce our new theme for the week, I had the class guess missing letters in our morning message to find out what we will be studying. They guessed several letters correct and a few incorrect. Once all the letters were revealed, we blended the letter sounds together to reveal we are learning all about "SPIDERS" this week!

Pumpkin Contest

We had a family pumpkin decorating contest at Mayflower this fall. Each family could submit one pumpkin to the display. Pumpkins could not come on the bus so they had to be brought in by parents (or neighbors) to the office. The categories for the contest were: sports, cartoons and animals. They could not be carved since the pumpkin would ‘weep’ and make a mess. We suggested using marker, paint, natural materials, cloth etc. for decoration on the pumpkin. There were prizes awared for each category! The kids really enjoyed going to the library each week and seeing the new pumpkins on display. We have some very creative families here at Mayflower!