Okay, so, we have learned all of our short vowel sounds. If you have driven past our room, you may have noticed the various shapes hanging in the window. Well, those are our visual resources and reminders of the short vowel sounds. Here is what they look like from the inside of our room...
Short a apple tree
Gilbert's short i fish bowl
Short o socks
Short e eggs in Betty Bird's nest
Short u bugs
**Yes, it's dark outside this window... I really do live at school... ;)
All of these projects were made by the kiddos. They had to write the short vowel word on their object. These will eventually come down once we begin learning long vowel sounds, so that we can put up new resource reminders. :)
We also made anchor charts that will stay up all year. The students gave me all of the words to write on these charts...
In science we have been working with matter and describing it with all of our describing words, or adjectives. We have especially been using our senses to describe the matter around us. It was absolutely PERFECT when Gianna came to school with a big bag of freshly picked apples. I cut them up and as we sampled the apple slices, we used our senses to describe the apples (matter!). Here is the anchor chart of their observations....
Thank you Gianna and family for this impromptu yummy matter describing lesson!!
After describing matter, we dove right into the three states of matter: solids, liquids, and gasses. We will be doing many experiments and observations to fill our brains with these three states. Here is the anchor chart we made together to summarize the three types...
You can only imagine the excitement when I blew bubbles out of our bubble bottle that inspired this chart... :)
In math we have been immersed in adding and subtracting. As a visual resource and reminder, we made Gus the Plus and Linus the Minus posters full of words that tell what each sign does (the children provided all of these words :))!
hmm... I see to have
Also, we have been practicing our math facts, as I am sure you have heard. The kids are SO loving Gumball Math Facts. I cannot take the credit for this idea though. I found it on this blog: Made for 1st Grade. I linked the post about their Gumball Math. In fact, I bought their Gumball pack to add to our fun! Here is our Gumball Math Fact wall...
This is the fact booklet that the students will use to study. We add a new page every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. However, your child should only study the page he/she needs to pass.
Last week we were working with ten-frames and parts of ten. We used daubers (always fun!) to make parts of ten in our ten-frames and wrote the number sentence to go with each frame.
Last, but not least, a few weeks ago we did this amazing lesson that I found on my favorite blogger's blog. It was so touching (I had teary eyes!). Here is the post from my other blog where I shared it...
So you know that saying, "Sticks and stone may break my bones, but words will never hurt me"??? It's false. I mean, yes, words will not actually break your bones, but they DO hurt. When I found this little think before you speak activity on Cara Carroll's blog HERE (at the bottom of her post), I was thrilled. Sometimes kids know exactly what they are saying, but sometimes they do not realize the hurtfulness of their words. This touching lesson really makes the lils think about their words.
I began by telling them the sticks and stones saying. Some had heard of it, but most had not. I explained what it meant, and we discussed how mean words can hurt our feelings. They all said they have experienced hurtful words... :/ Then, I explained that we were going to read the story Chrysanthemum by Kevin Henkes and gave a short summary, describing how the other characters are going to make fun of Chrysanthemum's name. Earlier, I had cut out a BIG heart from red bulletin board paper. I told the lils that we were going to crinkle and crumple up the heart each time someone in the story made fun of Chrysanthemum. As I read, we passed the heart around and crumpled it up for each hurtful word said to Chrysanthemum. They were amazed at how wrinkled it was becoming! Then, at the end of the story, the characters start to say kind things about her name. We tried our best to smooth out the wrinkles but to no avail. One lil was actually pretty upset that he was unable to straighten out the wrinkles... aww!! We discussed that even though the other students started being nice to Chrysanthemum, her heart was still wrinkled from their unkind words. To end the activity, we wrote our names on band aids (pen worked best on the fabric band aids) to try to help heal Chrysanthemum's heart AND as a little pledge to think before we speak.
This was such a beautiful lesson. My lils really took it to heart, pun intended. ;) As they were patching up the heart with their band aids, I heard them say, "Let's help her!" and "Let's make her feel better!" So sweet! I will hang to heart in the room as our visual reminder to think before we speak.
So there ya go, a little recap of this past month. My next post will have to be about all of the center games/activities that we have been playing. I keep the popular games on our blue center shelves for the kids to play during free (say what?!) time and when they finish early. These activities are really motivating for them, and they have taken charge of the center games, which leaves me some time to work one-on-one or in small groups to review other skills. It is FABULOUS!
Well, I hope you are enjoying fall so far and gearing up for Halloween! I can't wait to see all of these costumes I keep hearing about! Also, the kindergarten teachers and I may be planning another costume collaboration like our Rock, Paper, Scissors from last year... :)
~Miss Kearns
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