We are becoming stronger and stronger independent readers in Daniel’s K-1 All-Stars. Today we read another book from our Read On Your Own series of books called In the Van.
In this story the text is easy for emergent readers to decode. Students learned about how to find the problem and solution and used both the text and inferencing from the pictures. We filled out a story map labeling the characters, problem, solution, and setting of the story. Then as a class we brainstormed a few ideas for writing our own stories with a problem and solution.
For phonics we have been working on learning words that begin with the letter v. All students were provided with magnetic letters ‘v’, ‘a’, and ‘n’. They were encouraged to figure if they could make a word with those letters. Once everyone created the word van they were also provided with the letters f, p, t, c. Students made words using those letters and wrote them down in a list.
Yesterday a representative from Bering Land Bridge National Preserve came into our class to teach us about our ecosystem and the animals that live in it. She read us the story North: The Amazing Story of Arctic Migration. We learned about why certain animals live in cold climates, migrating patterns of arctic animals, and how animals survive and find food in the arctic.
Then students took turns picking an animal from a method of migration and deciding if they lived in the arctic or not. They sorted the animals by arctic animals and non arctic animals by taping the picture of the animal to the picture of the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve. We finished off the lesson with a song sung to the tune of If You’re Happy and You Know It. The title of the song was If You Live in the Arctic.
This week we finish up our unit on weather and seasons. We also continued our study on tall tales and we read a story called Snow Globe Family. One of our reading skills we have been learning is how to visualize parts of the story or make mind movies. So I read part of the story to them without showing them the pictures first. Then we came up with the things we visualized in a class list.
We then created our own snow globes and wrote about what we would do if we lived in a snow globe. We hung up our drawings and writing in the classroom.
Today as we continue our unit on Season & The Weather; we learned a new book genre called a tall tale. During our teacher read aloud portion of the day, we read the story called “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs”. It is a story that is written as a tall tale told by a grandpa with a big imagination.
At our writing station during centers today, students wrote their own tall tales about the weather and told which season they would happen in.
We celebrated Martin Luther King Jr. in our K-1 All-Stars class today. We learned the importance of treating each other as we would like to be treated, and the importance of the “golden rule”. First we watched the reading rainbows version of Martin Luther King Jr. by David A. Adler.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hC-RyrakaQM]
We discussed how MLK changed the world for a better place and filled out an anchor chart to illustrate what we’ve learned. The anchor chart displays I got from Eberhart’s Explorers teachers pay teacher’s store. The MLK unit is free to download. After we filled out our Anchor chart, we read an I Have a Dream, for poetry reading. Students had fun highlighting sight words.
Finally we wrote about what our dream (we’ve been learning about the letter Dd in phonics!) was for the world to be a better place. Students also used hand paint to help illustrate their dream. These cool printouts came from Teaching First’s blog.
In our reading program we’ve been learning about the weather and seasons. As we work towards becoming independent readers we’ve begun to read decodable books that focus on the skills we’ve been learning during our phonics time.
Our book this week focused on different types of weather found in spring called “What Is It?”. Our students first spent time practicing the book during the “read to others” portion of the day, and then got the option to practice independently reading the story.
We then discussed the story and the main character, Lin. Students discussed what type of weather Lin liked, and what weather Lin didn’t like. They used their inferencing skills to use the pictures to help them come to their conclusions. Then students illustrated their findings showing which weather Lin liked and did not like.
Continuing on with our Winter / The Four Seasons theme, we learned a new song / poem called The First Snow. We learned new winter vocabulary and practiced memorizing the words as we sang along to the song on CD.
Afterwards we cutout a picture of the boy from the song and helped him get dressed to go play outside. We colored and cutout the different winter clothes and discussed the correct sequence the boy would need to put them on.
Finally we wrote directions for others on how to get dressed for winter, and during centers students could create Venn Diagram to compare and contrast winter to summer!
As part of our Daily 5 routines that we’ve implemented we’ve been putting extra emphasis on word work. We have been building words using onset and rime, reading our decodable books, finding our sight words and writing them on sticky notes. We’ve also been building high frequency word sentences by sight word fish!
As we move into our Winter & The Four Seasons unit in our K-1 All-Star class; we read a children’s classic known as The Mitten retold by Jan Brett. The class retold the story by doing a reader’s theater and acting out as different characters of the story. We used masks from Jan Brett’s website.
For math workshop we worked on The Mitten printable math centers kindergarten add-on from The Mitten Learning Printables. They included number / quantity recognition mats, ordinal number sequence cards, mittens size cut and paste activity, and number counting puzzles.
For writing we discussed the different characters we remember from the story. Then we wrote about our favorite characters and something they did in the story.
