Our First Full Week of School

We just had our first full week of school and I'm sure you noticed your little one was exhausted.  Despite the hot and rainy weather, we were busy learning about monarch butterflies, the letter t, building our number sense with numbers 1-5, and exploring math materials.

All About Our Names

Since school began, we've completed several activities involving our names.  We read the book A My Name is Alice, which has a focus on names and the alphabet.  After reading this book, the children completed a self-portrait of themselves and came up with something that they like that begins with the same letter as their name.  For example: S my name is Sarah and I like strawberries.

We read the book Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, which was a fun interactive read aloud to do with the children!  After reading this book, the children individually created their own coconut tree and stuck letters that were in their names to their trees. 

We also read the book Chrysanthemum.  We learned the character, Chrysanthemum, had 13 letters in her name!  We then thought it would be fun to see how many letters are in our names.  So, we created a graph.  We noticed there was the same amount of children who had 5 letters in their names as there was with children who had 6 letters in their names.  We also noticed there was no one who had 8 or more letters in their name. 

On Thursday, the children practiced spelling their name and their friends names with magnetic letters.

During morning meeting, we've also been singing Hickety Pickety Bumble Bee, which a great way to not only greet every one, but also to learn their names and how many syllables are in their names.  Below is a little video showing you what our greeting looks and sounds like.  You can always ask your child to sing the song to you, maybe using a sibling or pet name.

Fundations



We have begun our Fundations program, which is a program that provides the children with a foundation for reading, writing, and spelling. The next 12 weeks, the children will be introduced to 2-3 letters each week. Throughout the week the children are engaged in various activities that will have the children learning the name of the letters, the sounds they produce (phonics), word awareness, syllable awareness, and phoneme awareness (identifying sounds, blending sounds, segmenting sounds).

Each week, I will be posting the new letters being introduced on our blog (on the right hand side). When a new letter is introduced, the children learn the name of the letter, the keyword, and the sound. For example: for the letter t, the children would say t, top, /t/.

Echo and Baby Echo (snow owls) will be helping your child learn his or her letters. They will also be using a whiteboard with the skyline, plane line, grass line, and worm line, which is the language we use when forming the letters.  More on this will be sent home next week in your child's Friday Folder.

Math

On Monday and Tuesday, we continued to work on sorting shoes by their attributes.  Wednesday-Friday, our mini-lessons focused on the structure of 5 through a five-frame.  A five-frame is an important mathematical tool that provides opportunities for looking at quantities in the range of 1-5.  The children had several opportunities to recognize the number of dots in a five-frame and represent that number with their math hands (finger patterns).  These activities also provided opportunities for one-to-one correspondence and to begin to learn the combinations of 5 (4 + 1, 3 + 2).

In math stations this week, the children continued to explore polydrons, pattern blocks, unifix cubes, geoboards, and pennies.  Another station was added this week that had the children building numbers 0-9 with Legos.  Next week, we'll be adding a few more math stations.  Ask your child what their favorite station is so far and why. 

Theme

We wrapped up our theme of monarch butterflies this past week by completing some fun projects!  We did a close reading (thinking about the important information and what it means) of a monarch butterfly book, which was on PebbleGo, a digital library of non-fiction books.  We also read several other books that helped us learn even more facts about monarch butterflies.

One of the projects that we completed this week had the children representing the life cycle using pasta pieces.  The children first drew details in each of the 4 boxes.  The details included milkweed plants and weather.  After, they glued on their pasta pieces for each stage of the life cycle and finally labeled each stage.

The children also drew monarch butterflies and labeled their body parts, which was a very hard task, but they did an amazing job with following directions and completing the activity.  As a class, we wrote what we learned about monarch butterflies. 

We are still awaiting the arrival of our monarch butterflies.  Currently, we have 2 chrysalis's in our classroom that we are hoping will turn into butterflies.  The children observed and drew a picture of a chrysalis in their science notebook as well this week.  

Lastly, we read the book The Very Hungry Caterpillar several times.  Then, the children created their own version of this book by illustrating the pages and cover.  We will be reading the book they created as a class and then it will be placed in their book boxes for them to read on their own.  

Building A Community of Learners

This week during morning meeting, the children and I brainstormed some possible classroom rules.  As a class we came up and agreed upon: be safe, be kind, be responsible, try our best, and have fun.  The children signed a star, which was placed on the rules poster, showing they supported and agreed to follow these rules.  With our rules, we have been discussing what it looks like and sounds like to be safe, kind, and responsible. This coming week, the children will be sharing what they hope to learn/do this school year, which is a great tie into our classroom rules.   

We read the book Chrysanthemum again, but with a different focus the second time around.  Each time Victoria, Rita, and Jo (characters in the book) were not being kind to Chrysanthemum, a child would come up to a large heart and crinkle it.  Any time Victoria, Rita, and Jo were kind to Chrysanthemum, a child would come up to the large heart and smooth out the crinkles.  In the end, we noticed the heart still had crinkles even though the girls were kind at times to Chrysanthemum.  The important lesson we learned is that we need to think about what we are going to say to someone, especially when our feelings are hurt by that person, before we actually say it as we could crinkle their heart.  And it's hard to make a crinkled heart smooth!  This was a great hands-on activity that the children really enjoyed. 


Mrs. Tatlock

Mrs. Tatlock came into the classroom on Friday.  She reviewed clear, sparkle, and mud mind with the children.  She then read the book The Crayon Box that Talked, which was another book that celebrated and appreciated our differences.  It's important to be who you are!