Beginning, Middle and End Strategy Lesson!

One of our main CAFE strategy focuses this week was on retelling the beginning, middle and end of a story. We practiced with several books throughout the week during our mini-lessons and ended the week retelling one of our favorite stories The Legend of Spookley the Square Pumpkin. Since we had read the story earlier in the week, we watched a video clip of the story before filling in our chart!

We Can--Poem 10/19/2012

This week our sight word was "we". We enjoyed reading our poem in silly voices, acting out the motions and practicing our word by word matching! Below are two videos of our performance. The first we are reading it and the second acting out the motions!

 

 

 

 

 

Exploring With Morning Work!

For our morning work every day, each table gets a blue tub of  manipulatives. The students job is to explore using these manipulatives in various ways. Some create patterns, pictures, buildings and much more! Just one way of adding in a little "play" into our day!

Shape Drawing

We introduced a new activity for "Math with Someone" today. We have begun learning about the 3D shapes cone, sphere, cube and cylinder. The students take a baggie with various 3D shapes and build something with them. After they build their picture, they draw what they built on their paper. They love being able to use their imagination to build with the shapes and then illustrate their work too!

Writing Beginning & Ending Sounds

We have been practicing writing sentences with sight words and the beginning and ending sounds of words we do not know how to spell. Today for our morning message, we wrote two "We can ___." sentences where we had to fill in the blanks for the missing sight words, plus the missing word we did not know how to spell. We stretched the word out and wrote down the sounds we heard at the beginning and the end of the word.

Our two sentences were:

 

"We can rn" (run)

"We can sp" (skip)

 

Number Swat It!

Today during one of our mini-lessons for math we practice number recognition with a game called "Swat It". Students went head to head to be the first to find a given number. Whoever found and "swatted" the number first stayed up front to face another student. The class loved practicing their numbers with a little friendly competition =).