This last week our theme was Color Week. Our goal was to be able to read all the color words and celebrate a color a day. Each day we celebrated a color by bringing in something for show and tell that represented each color. Monday was red, Tuesday was orange, Wednesday was yellow, Thursday was green. We also played games that matched each color per day on www.starfall.com. Finally we completed poems by writing the color sight word in the blank lines. The poems can be found here.
As we finished up our Thanksgiving activities last week, we read some more books about the first Thanksgiving and learned more about Native Americans and Pilgrims. For math we’ve been learning about 2D and 3D shapes, and how to make bigger shapes from smaller shapes. We made Native Americans designs from pattern block shapes.
During poetry time, we read the poem Five Little Turkeys using retelling cards and turkey pictures. Then students filled in missing words using number word sight word knowledge. The Five Little Turkeys book and cards came from Kindergarten Fever’s TpT.
We read the poem Families and looked for sight words and rhyming words. When we drew a picture of our families on the back of the poem. Then we made construction paper puppets of one of our family members.
We also wrote about why our families are special to us and traced our hands to make “hug writing”.
This week we began our unit on families. First we read a poem about families on the smart board and decorated them for their poetry journals.
Later on in the day we discussed how families are important and the things that they do together. Then we read the story “Gone Fishing” which is a story about a boy going fishing with his dad.
Then we made connections with the story and talked about things we like to do with our family. Finally we wrote and illustrated those things that we like to do.
We read the poem the Halloween Surprise and looked for sight words using dry erase markers, and finding sight words on our own poems. Then we made Halloween cards inviting our parents to our Halloween party that we will be having next week.
We learned a new song called “Autumn Leaves” by the learning station. We also read the story “Autumn’s First Leaf” and talked about our favorite fall colors and practiced completing sentences with our sight words.
We also added a new poem into our poetry journals and made tissue paper fall trees.
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.
To celebrate the letter P, and to start off our food and nutrition theme; we read our new poem called Pancakes. Students practiced reading the poem by using their finger for tracking. Throughout the week well continue to learn the poem and practice our fluency. Then as a class we looked for rhyming words in the poem and created our own stack of pancakes.
We have continued to learn about poems and today we listened to the poem 5 Little Pumpkins Sitting on a Gate on the SMART board. We listened to the song and learned ordinal numbers by following along with the song / poem.
Then to practice what we’ve learned about ordinal numbers, we played an ordinal numbers matching game. Students stood up in front of the room while other students sat down and called out two different ordinal numbers, “I’ll pick the 2nd student and the 5th student”. If they made a match with the Halloween picture they scored a point.
This last week I introduced the class to poetry and read to them the special halloween poem called “The Halloween Surprise”. We practice looking for rhyming words and recognizing special sight words from the poem.
Then students used words and ideas from the Halloween Surprise to create their own Halloween stories and writing. They also created a construction paper jack-o-lantern to go along with their writing.
