I missed Five for Friday (again). But here are five random things from our week! I love linking up with Doodle Bugs for this linky party.
1. We tried Rambutan this week! It was our healthy fruit snack. Everyone tried it!
2. Introducing new centers! Word work writing in rice. They wrote -at words and -ig words and read the words they wrote.
3. Our library lesson with Mrs. Honeycutt. They read the book, Katy No Pocket, and then they made books with clues to what they were about. They used creativity and imagination and then shared with a partner! It was great!
4. The 8th grade and the high school choir performed at Faris on Friday morning! The first picture was proof of how well-behaved our class was during the whole thing!
They sounded magical!
5. Kansas Day Celebration! I made sunflower cookies for my kiddos.
Students researched our great state and shared those facts with their family! We invited family into our classroom Friday morning for Kansas Day presentations. (The wheels are spinning with ideas for next year!).
Students used the microphone and shared from their foldables.
I never seem to make the Five for Friday post on Fridays. *sigh* But I am not giving up! I will post even though Saturday will be over soon! I love the idea of Five for Friday. Five random things from the day or the week using pictures and a short description. Thanks Kacey for hosting every week! Now head over to Doodle Bug's Teaching and read about everyone's week!
1. Math centers. It's a little time consuming to set up and teach expectations for these, but they are so good for the kids! They learn social skills, hone their math skills, and learn collaboration/cooperation skills.
Stop, Gumdrop and Roll! A 2 person game using simple addition and dice. This game came from Miss Kindergarten's December Math Centers. I have the same game called Cocoa Cover Up from Miss Kindergarten Love.
This game is called Catch Me If You Can and is from Miss Kindergarten's December Math Centers for Kindergarten.
Cocoa Cover Up!
2. Build the number. I chose one card with a number on it and placed it on each table. The table had to build the number any way they wanted. If they didn't want to use manipulatives, they could have drawn a picture. Everyone chose to use a mixture of base ten blocks and single count unifix cubes. Two tables worked together and at two tables each student worked independently to build the number. Then they counted it for me and made sure it matched the number on the card.
3. We worked on writing skills in a reading group! They built the sentence using the individual words. When they wrote them, they made sure that: They used uppercase/capital letter where appropriate, put appropriate punctuation in, and used their best handwriting formation according to our Fundations program! Then they illustrated the sentence!
4. Writing Center update! I sorted through all the writing center supplies and organized them Friday after school.
New cards for writing notes to people we love!
Different kinds of paper.... 1/2 sheets to fold into cards, postcard sized paper, and left over paper strips from our Thanksgiving turkeys.
Major organization storage here! Die cuts, small colorful papers, things to cut out, stickers galore and sentence strips with words on them (for instance, I have the word From on one sheet).
Should be fun!
So what do you put in your writing center? Is it more guided? Or is it more student choice?
Last, but certainly not least. I posted a donorschoose project this week. I have started several before, but never finished writing them and so this is my first project to post. Please help support my class! Check out my donorschoose project here!
If you would be interested in donating to our project, there is a code to use until the end of the day on the 25th! If you use the code LIFTOFF then donorschoose will match the amount up to $100!! Please help my students gain more valuable skills by having iPads available in our classroom!
In our small group reading group we read An Orange in January. We made connections to the story. We talked about our favorite fruit. Then we shared a juicy orange.
Sixth grade reading buddies! Mrs. Goertzen's sixth grade class came and read with us! First we read our early readers to them, then they read books to us! We are planning to make this a regular event!
Cool Beans! If you have missed it, here's the story about Cool Beans! It is our whole class reward system for behavior that is on track or above and beyond expectations! This is a hard-working bunch of students and they earn rewards very quickly! Because it is so important in Kindergarten to learn about ways to organize numbers and learn number sense, I put ten frames around our beans over the winter break. Students did a fine job knowing when we had a row of 5 before, but it is organized in a way that makes sense and should help them count even faster now.
Once they get 20 "big beans" they earn a whole class party. As I "catch" little behaviors in the room I might give them a small bean in a little can. The goal is to get 20 pinto beans moved from one can to the other. Once this happens, we get a whole class bean, or a "big bean." Another way to earn big beans is fill their individual behavior sticker charts. Compliments for our class from other teachers is a one of our favorite ways to get a bean for our whole class reward. When they earn a whole class party, we take several suggestions and then we vote on the one we like the most. This time they voted for a whole class fluffy friend day. They did a great job!
Introducing her fluffy friend names Peach.
Introducing his fluffy friend named DarthVader.
We are working really hard to bring in more technology! There are some obstacles to overcome, like long tedious passwords for computers. But we are getting some tech time to happen! We have the privilege of having an Osmo system now (Thank you usd 308, it is super cool!!!) for iPad. So.... the Osmo was in rotation on Friday, and we had computer rotations! For fun Friday students could choose math or reading games, but what activities they are allowed to choose usually goes with whatever rotation time we are in.... during reading rotations, they can play reading/phonics games, during math rotations, they can play math games.
Mr. Galindo comes in our room to assist us. Here he is making sure this learner gets to the right place!
We have been reading about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the ways he made our country a better place. We were somber when we realized that we would not be allowed to go to school with many of our friends at one time in our history.
I love this photo for so many reasons! This lovely little learner is working diligently! I love, love, love that she "gets it" about how much glue to use! :)
That is a peak at our week. So much more happened that I did not capture! We have been working on sight words, or know-by-heart words! Our phonics program calls them "trick words" because so many of them are not words that can be phonetically sounded out. There is no color song for gray, but your child knows how to spell their color words thanks to the color word songs. They also know many of their number words and we've introduced a LOT of trick words already. This week our early readers focused on the sight words: I, am, a, the, little. Most students soared through these because they knew these sight words already. I have to give a big, big thanks to parents, grandparents and older siblings for helping these kids practice sight word flashcards! Thank you so much!!
If you go to youtube you will find a plethora of color word songs, just like the this one. I woke up with this song in my head this morning.
