Weekly Poem 1/27/2012

Go In and Out the Window

Math by Myself--Missing #'s by 5's & 10's

We have a new choice activity in our Math by Myself choice during Daily 5 Math. This choice gives students extra practice both with skip counting by 5's and 10's, as well as writing numbers above 20. Our standard in kindergarten is to be able to write numbers up to 20, but this activity allows for students to stretch beyond the standard. On laminated pieces of paper, the students have a full hundreds chart complete with missing numbers in both the 5's column and on the other side the 10's column. Students go through skip counting and fill in the missing number using a dry erase marker.

Accuracy Mini-Lesson Blend Onset and Rime

For a whole group mini-lesson today, we practiced our new word families by pulling one card out of each pile. Students picked either the yellow piles or the blue piles and picked one card from the onset and one card from the rime. After they picked the card, they put the two cards together and built the word. Once each student read their word, we read the word a second time as a class.

Special Guests for Surfer of the Week!

Today, Ben's mother and father came to our classroom to teach us about the Chinese New Year. They started off by reading us a story about a little boy who lives in China and in the end turns into a dragon that helps form a river in his home town. After reading the story, each child went back to their seats to create their own puppet dragon. The class loved having Ben's parents join our class and were very excited to take the puppets home and use their imagination!

Word Families "-ug" and "-ub"

As I introduced our new word families this week, we brainstormed words that might be found in each of the word families. After filling in the families "house" we put them in a basket in our word work station to use during that choice for Daily 5. At the end of the week, we will see if we can compile an even longer list of words in each word family than we were able to at the beginning of the week.

We also have three words from each family hanging above our tables as our new table names.

Weekly Reader--Brrrr!

Going along with our study of snowy weather and the cold temperatures in winter, we read a Weekly Reader all about snow! Inside the magazine it talked about animals who hibernate and migrate in the winter seasons. We were excited to learn two new vocabulary words and put them on our word collector! I had a few extra smaller versions of the magazine that we put in the "winter" basket on our book shelf to be available for students to pick when shopping for new books for their book boxes.

Snow Painting

On Friday, we finished our week off by painting snowflakes and snow balls. The students had a choice if they wanted to use a paint brush to paint snowflakes or use a sponge to make snow balls. They were to make a picture just as if they were looking out the window of our classroom and seeing the snow falling from the sky. To make the lesson even better, was that it was snowing A LOT that afternoon and the visual was easy to picture!

CAFE Lesson "Author's Purpose"

Last week we worked on a new CAFE strategy "Author's Purpose". This strategy focuses on the reasons why an author writes his book. We discussed three main reasons for writing a book. Those reasons spell the word PIE.

P-persuasion

I-information

E-entertainment

To help the students grasp this concept we read several books and after each book we discussed what the author's purpose for writing that book was. In our grade level, most of the books we read are strictly for entertainment "fun" only. We have read a few books that seem to overlap in reasons why the author wrote them. The two that seem to work together the most are information and entertainment. There are several books where the author is teaching us something important, but is using humor to do so. We will continue focusing on this strategy this week, as well as refer back to it throughout the rest of the year.

Below are a few books we either read last week or revisited from reading earlier in the year to discuss the author's purpose.

 











 

Rain on the Rooftops

This week we practiced reading our poem with and without motions. Below are two videos showing both ways.

Accuracy Lesson on Syllables

A new CAFE strategy that I introduced this week was "Count syllables in one to three segments." We have talked about syllables before this week, but decided to add it to our CAFE board as a new strategy under the "A" for Accuracy. Below is a video of our mini-lesson in action. The class sat in a circle with a pile of our class names in the middle upside down. Each student took a turn and pulled a name out. That student read the name on the card, clapped the rhythm of the name, told us how many syllables and then the entire class clapped the name together!

  

New Year's Resolutions

At the beginning of the week, we talked about what New Year's resolutions/goals were. We completed a predictable chart filling in our own specific goals for this next year.



Throughout the week we practiced one of our CAFE strategies "Word by Word Matching" while reading our sentences aloud to the class.







To finish out the week, we rewrote our sentences into a speech bubble, created ourselves with a party hat on and placed them in the hallway for all to read our goals for 2012! It's going to be a great year!

Popcorn Party!

As a class we earn surfboards for overall good behavior above and beyond what is expected of us. When we earn 10 surfboards we pull a prize out of our mystery envelope. We earned our 10th surfboard this week and earned a popcorn party!

Stretching Fun!

Our poem this week was called Stretching Fun. The sight word we practiced all week was the sight word "and". It was in the poem 4 times!

Math with Someone--Counting Tiger!

One of the mini-lessons we complete as a class is to practice counting using our "Counting Tiger" which can be read about here. The students pick an animal out of our Zoo Phonics animal bucket and find a spot in the room. They take turns passing the animal back and forth while counting as high as they can! 

Using Apps on our iPod Touches!

The students in the video below are using several various apps on our iPod touches. These apps are reinforcing skills that have been taught in class. Some of the skills below are spelling, rhyming, letter sounds, missing letter, patterns and writing numbers.

Make a video - it's fun, easy and free!
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Holiday Party!

December 23rd was our last day of school before winter break. I had several parents volunteer to come and help run a station during our holiday party. They did an absolutely WONDERFUL job with the students and creating all of their adorable masterpieces. Thank you to each of you who came in and those of you who donated something for the party. Below is a video I put together with pictures from the party and our book exchange. Enjoy!

Make a video - it's fun, easy and free!
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Adventures of our Elf on the Shelf....Final Week!

Our silly classroom elf, Candy Cane, was up to no good his last week with us. Look below to find out the places we found him each morning!


On Monday, we found him hanging out on the Hawaiian lei behind Mrs. Brown's desk.



Tuesday, he was snuggled up under our tree reading a book called The Snowy Day. We think he was wishing for a white Christmas!






On Wednesday, he wrote us a note. During indoor recess the day before Candy Cane was bumped into and dropped his book and fell over. He told us in his note it scared him when he almost got hurt and he was hoping we would be extra careful and be sure to take care of him, but not to touch him because he did not want to lose his magic. He told us that if we kept him safe he would try to bring us snow from the North Pole! When he was taping the note up on the board, it looks like he got a little carried away and got himself tangled up and taped to the wall too!

Thursday, he got into the candy canes and decided to have a snack. The problem was, he is a messy eater! He left crumbs from his candy cane all over our classroom! Luckily, he cleaned it up that night and the mess was gone the next morning.






On his final day in our classroom, Friday, he completed his promise of bringing snow from Santa's house at the North Pole. He made a little bit of a mess and created his own snow angel! He was nice to save some snow in a cup for us to touch and feel. We did not have any snow fall on the ground outside, so he must have really brought us the snow from Santa! We were excited to see the difference in what the snow feels like up north. It was still cold though!








We enjoyed having our classroom elf for the few weeks up until Christmas. We hope he told Santa all of the good things we were doing in our classroom! Before Candy Cane left, he wrote us another note saying he left us a surprise in Mrs. Brown's desk. Sure enough, in the bottom drawer was a bag of candy canes, one for each student. We will miss you Candy Cane! Until next year.....

We Wish You a Merry Christmas!

Light Bulb Graphing

Today, the class worked in pairs to complete a graph using a bag of different colored Christmas lights. Each group had a different amount of red, yellow, green, purple and blue lights in the bag. They first sorted the lights into groups of alike colors and then counted each group of lights before graphing on their page.