Saturday, September 19, 2015

Week in Review--Mo Willems


Reading:

This week in reading we focused on the CAFE strategy "Match the pictures to the words." We practiced this strategy as a group, individuals and with partners. We used read alouds and leveled readers to find words that match pictures on the page to help us as learning readers! Our accuracy focus this week was mainly on those hard working vowels at the beginning of the week and then we continued the week with all of the letters of the alphabet. We watched one of our favorite videos, "Vowel Bat" (see the video below), found vowels in books, played a letter toss mat game, letter sound bingo and learned how to play our new Friday game called WHAMMY! We will add sight words and word family words throughout the school year each week to our WHAMMY buckets!









 
Looking for those hardworking vowels!






BINGO!













WHAMMY in action!



Math:

This week in math we found different ways to make the numbers 6-10! We started learning how to make tally marks too!

We began learning about our first choice during Math Daily 3. This choice is similar to Read to Self, is called Math by Myself. This choice has students practicing various math skills, games and activities during math time independently. Our first choices during this time are geo board shapes and white board number writing! We also learned a new game on our iPads called 123 Ninja. This app has students practice their number recognition, they loved it!













































Writing:

This week in writing we learned all about the letters Hh, Vv, Yy, Ww and Xx. We had so much fun creating a house out of the H, volcano out the V, glued yarn on a Y, made a worm out of the W crawling on the grass and played music while gluing the xylophone together for the X! We are loving our letter of the day lessons and will finish up with the last two letters next week!





















Content:

This week was all about the author Mo Willems. We mainly focused on his pigeon books but also love his elephant and piggy books. We watched a video where the author talked about what it means to be an author and an illustrator and why he wants kids to continue learning to write and draw. We then created our own sentences to go along with the book Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus. Each student changed the last word "bus" to something else that they wouldn't want the pigeon to drive. We finished the week off by creating our own pigeon out of a toilet paper roll! Too much fun!

Other:

These kids never cease to amaze me and make me laugh. Friday during our morning recess was one of those times that reminds me how much I love my job. The kids were outside playing and came up to me with pure joy and excitement saying "Mrs. Brown!! We found a dinosaur footprint!!" Then a few minutes later they informed me that they found a dinosaur bone by the basketball hoop. I just love it! I recorded video and took a picture below! Enjoy!




Next Week:
  • In reading we will learn the CAFE strategy "Listen with Understanding".
  • In writing we will finish the last two letters of the alphabet.
  • In math we will focus on recognizing numbers 1-20!
  • Our theme next week is all about APPLES!
Important Dates/Information:
  • 9/24 First School Wide Behavior Celebration-Blue the Colts mascot will be at school! 
  • 9/30 Field Trip to Exploration Acres (please send in money)
  • 10/9 End of First 9 Weeks
  • 10/19-10/22 Parent/Teacher Conferences