This week we’ve been learning about holiday traditions and the differences between needs and wants during the holidays. We started off by reading How the Grinch Stole Christmas and discussed how the Grinch learned that Christmas wasn’t about presents. We made construction paper Grinchs and wrote how we would make the Grinch grin.
For social studies the next day, we watched a video on Brain Pop Jr about what a need is, what a want is, and their differences. We sorted pictures into the two categories. For art we made stockings, cut out pictures from magazines, and sorted them into needs and wants on the stockings. You can get a Christmas Needs vs Wants freebie activity here.
It has been a long week for me as I have been pretty sick for part of it. However during the time I was in school we learned about election day, the voting process, and what majority and minority means. We voted on our favorite holiday, and graphed the results.
Then in preparation for veterans day we read the story Hero Dad and graphed about what soldiers are, can do, and have. During our art time we made construction paper soldiers.
The whole week we had several veterans day related centers. Students read and completed emergent reader books using number words, colored soldier pages based on numbers 6-9, ordering numbers 1-10, and count the room using ten frames. The veterans day centers come from Cara Carroll.
The month of October is fire safety month so we have been learning what to do if there is ever a fire, as well things that we shouldn’t play with. We started on Monday with fire safety related literacy & math centers from Having Fun in Primary. There were also a few centers from Home School Creations.
We discussed how there are things that are not safe for kids to touch or play with, we then sorted pictures into two categories ‘safe to touch‘ and ‘not safe to touch‘. During free choice centers students got to sort the pictures on their own, working with a partner.
Finally today we read the story Stop Drop and Roll by Margery Cuyler and made a firetruck craft courtesy of Miss-Kindergarten.
If you visit my Guided Reading Section in my curriculum page, you see a description of what reading workshop is.
Each day students are placed in tiered groups high-medium-low and are given various centers to interact with. Each center reinforces previous skills taught such as word families, sight words, phonics, and the like.
Then myself or my teacher assistant will call over students to read books based on the reading level they are at. Each book selected is related to the theme that we are at in our class. In small groups students read their books and are given comprehension activities that go along with the book.
One of our reading groups read “This Is My Bear”, and then they classified and sorted pictures that they saw. The students are guided to recognize the pictures can be sorted by pictures of Teddy Bears and pictures that are not Teddy Bears.
