I had meant to redesign the room for next year but I decided to do it this year. First off I decided to change around my library and make it much more easy for our students to use and access. Still haven’t put up the new signs for the library, right now they are just printed small labels. But in order to have full access to the library my desk had to be moved to the other side of the room. However this move opened up a lot more floor space for the students.
New Library set up
Art & Writing Center
Building Block Center
Creative Play Center
Small Group Center & Writing Center
Math Center
Whole Group Area
The new location of my desk
We read Waiting for Wings and discussed the how the butterfly changed throughout the book. We then completed cut and glue sequence pages on the life cycle of a butterfly.
Then to add art and math into the lesson we painted butterflies only on one side and folded the paper over, to create a mirror image. This demonstrated the concept of symmetry.
To celebrate Earth Day K/1 All-Stars joined up with their 2/3 grade reading buddies to go on a village clean up! We split up into two groups and one group took one side of the village while the other group took the other side. Our kids were surprised to see the amount of trash that there was to pick up just in our short walk!
When we got back to class we wrote another letter to Mother Earth describing all the things that we were thankful for that she provides for us!
Continuing on with our spring unit we have been learning about parts of a plant and their needs. We learned a song, “Flower, Stem, Leaves, and Roots”, followed motions on our bodies pretending we were the plant and read a written copy of it. This was done to differentiate our reading comprehension to our learners that are more musically inclined, and kinesthetic learners .
We then took what we learned from the song and the dance and created a diagram of a plant and labeled it’s parts and the things it needs to grow.
We then took beans and and put them in a little bit of water to see if we could get them to grow. First we will just add a little water and put them in soil later once they’ve started to sprout a little bit.
This last Friday the K-1 class had some spring and Easter activities to celebrate the upcoming holiday. We dyed our own eggs, painted a picture of an easter egg, and did some math easter centers!
This week we have started our new unit “Buggy about Spring!”. We started by reading the story Hopper Hunts for Spring and then we went on a nature walk to see if we could signs of spring. We saw snow melting, heard crows, felt rain falling, and smelled the fresh air. Because we live so close to the arctic circle, it takes longer for the snow to the melt. So our pictures of our spring looks more like winter in the lower 48. When we came back we wrote about our 5 senses in spring.
Last week we finished up our unit on Our Community and Communities around the world. Mr. Daniel’s dad is a retired police officer and he decided to share his job with the class. Since it is expensive and difficult for him to fly from Houston all the way out to our isolated village, we had him Skype with the whole class!
Mr. Mike (as our class called him) showed us his uniform and all the things he used to use while on the job. He also showed his revolver and explained to us about gun safety. The K-1 All-Stars got to interview Mr. Mike and we completed our KWL chart about Police Officers and Mr. Mike.
As we move along with our community helpers unit we learned about firefighters and watched a Mr. Rogers Neighborhood video that showed us about firefighters. We also learned that not only do firefighters help put out fires, we also learned that they teach us about fire safety. We then read a book called “Stop, Drop, and Roll” and completed a sentence starter telling our audience that we would remember to do if there was a fire.
Continuing on our unit about learning about communities and community helpers we’ve been learning about jobs not only in our community but elsewhere. We started out talking about how students can go wherever they choose to go and be who they choose to be and we reread Oh The Places You’ll Go. Students colored, cut, and glued pictures of community helpers; and matched them with their related mode of transportation. For writing students wrote about what they wanted to be when they grew up.
For the past few weeks we have been learning about our community and the different people that are in it. We’ve also been learning about how other communities are different from each other, and about the different jobs in our neighborhood and throughout the world.
We started off the unit discovering our neighborhood and the important places in it. We then made our own individual map of Shaktoolik as well as a whole class map of our neighborhood. We took colored pictures of places in our neighborhood and labelled the map with markers.
Later on in our unit we started learning about people and helpers in our neighborhood. Many of our Guided reading books taught us of the different people who helped us, we watched a few people in our neighborhood songs (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2bbnlZwlGQ), and designed our own neighborhood in the building block center.
