We started our day studying photographs of rain. We thought about words that describe rain. The children did a great job of coming up with words that described how heavy the rain is coming down in the photographs we studied. I was hoping to get to a science lesson later in the day, but this will have to do for today. Of course, no study of rain would be complete without a peek at somebody thoroughly enjoying the rain. Enjoy! In reading, we reviewed the short vowel e. This is a tricky vowel that turns up in a lot of our work in CKLA. We practiced writing consonant-vowel-consonant words and wrote a short sentence today on the whiteboards. We started to make vowel sticks but will need to finish those another day. We will use the vowel sticks to identify the vowel in three letter words. We also practiced writing another tricky word. I introduced the word "the." This is a tricky word because we have not learned the th digraph and the /e/ in this words is not the short sound the children are learning now. So this is a word they must memorize. We took time to practice writing it together on white boards by saying the word, saying and writing the letters in the word, and the saying the word again. We do this to build fluency, so as they are writing and repeating, I slowly get faster as I am leading them in writing and spelling out loud. In math we worked with longer and shorter. We are making sure we get our words in the right place as we compare items that are longer or shorter. We are also working hard not to use the words bigger and smaller, but are more specific in describing size. December is Diversity Month. Today we learned about the word diversity. We talked about the definition of diversity, what race is, and how diversity includes many ways we are different. As we go through this month reading books and talking about diversity, we will also be very aware of how much we are also the same. Before you watch this video, if you decide to, ask me to show you the word diversity and friend in sign language. Enjoy this video. I also put in a basic definition of diversity so you know how we are defining in class. Have a nice evening!
Miss Wolfe
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We had a quick "field trip" this morning to look at landforms. This class is always ready for a trip! They took pictures with their pretend cameras and enjoyed the beautiful landforms in some of our National Parks. I'll put the video in below so you can enjoy it as well. We looked at and named the different landforms. There are only a few things in this video that are human-made and every other beautiful thing is from nature. We also learned from our virtual guide, Billy Bluehair, how some of these landforms were made over millions of years. Ask me to tell you the name of some of the landforms in the video. In reading, we practiced reading simple consonant-vowel-consonant words. We need a lot more practice with short vowels, so I will be adding extra work that we will do to help children with these tricky sounds! I will be doing a quick assessment to see who has the vowel sounds and how is still learning them to make a couple groups. Please don't be concerned if your child is still learning the short vowel sounds; they are tricky and they just haven't had enough practice with them.
In math, we worked first with number lines. We talked about what we noticed, then how they increase by one when you move to the right and decrease to zero as you move to the left. We played a fun game of Mind Reader where I think of a number and they have to guess the number. We started by using a number line from 0-10. One child would guess a number and I would tell them if it was more or less than that number. We would cross out the numbers it couldn't be then, so they guessed 9, and the number was 4, I would say it was less than 9. We knew it couldn't be ten so we would cross that out. This game can be played with any number line, it doesn't have to be 0-10, it can be 5 - 25 if you like. This is a great game to play if you find yourself waiting somewhere and have paper and a pencil. We also talked more about measurement and rules for measurement. We also reviewed some of the vocabulary used when measuring. We will get a lot of practice this week measuring! Stay warm! Miss Wolfe What a busy day! We started our day by looking and listening to different musical groups. We talked about what a muscian is, and studied a few of the instruments from the clips I played for the children. We drew pictures of muscians with their instruments or singing to show examples of musicans. In our Knowledge lesson, we read the folktale Brementown Muscians. This folktale is about animals who want to see the world but get a little sidetracked. Ask me to tell you about the folktale Brementown Musicians.
In Skills, we worked with the n sound. We compared it to the m sound, which is a common confusion of sounds. Saying the wounds and paying attention to what our mouth and tongue are doing helps children to feel and hear the difference in the sounds. We practice blending and segemnting today. We talked about the beginning of a new marking period and how we are doing as learners. We read a very silly story alled Wake Me Up in 20 Coconuts, by Laurie Keller. We got pretty loud with this story! This is a story of a character who lives in an apartement building. The character is a know-it-all and when asked to wake their neighbor in 20 cocnuts is confused. The know-it-all does not want to ask how long 20 cocnuts is because they don't want anyone to know they don't know what it is because they want others to think they know everything. We talked about how saying "I don't know" is okay when you are learning. While I don't want the children to say that all the time, we talked about how nobody knows everything and saying "I don't know: is okay, however, they might want to tell what they are thinking. The purpose of the lesson was to get some of the children who are reluctant to share their ideas only when they are 100% sure to take more intellectual risks and raise their hand and participate even if they aren't sure of thei idea or answer. In math we began a geometry unit. This is a short unit, but a lot of fun! We played a guessing game today with a big bag of flat and solid shapes. We began to develop vocabulary used in describing hte shapes. I am not sure how it happened, but there were a lot of hexagons in the bag, and children started just pulling hexagons out of the bag! Have a nice evening! Miww Wolfe So much has been going on the past few weeks. We have had lots of testing, field trips, drills, and special events. Here are some pictures that shows some of what we've been up to! Sensory Stations were a big hit! We used our senses to explore different materials as part of our CKLA Amplify Senses Knowledge unit. Lunch! Math game. We put numerals in order from 0 to 10 and 10 to 0. The children had a pile of numerals and had to decide if the numeral came before or after the cards already placed in a line. The did a great job! Halloween! Kid Museum field trip. Most of these pictures are of the group I took around the museum, but I tried to get other students in the pictures when I could.
Busy day! We worked with the /g/ sound like goat. We practiced making the sound, being sure to just make the /g/ and not add on an /u/. We also practicing making the /g/ and /k/ sound to hear the difference because there is also confusion with these two sounds. We practicing writing the letter g. This is a tricky letter because the children often put it on the wrong line. We will work more with this next week. We got the shape of it down, we just need to work on placement more. We had an SEL lesson that reinforced our /g/. We read Grumpy Goat, by Brett Helquist is a beautiful story about friendship. Grumpy Goat arrives at a happy, friendly farm to live but is grumpy and mean to the other animals. He has never had a friend until he sees a dandelion growing on top of a hill. Ask me to tell you what happens. This story helps children see that their feelings can change, just as Grumpy Goat's feelings change throughout the story. This is a good reminder when having sad, mad, grumpy, etc. feelings. The lesson also shows how good friends are there for their friends when they are sad. Ask me to tell you what happened when Grumpy Goat was sad. This is such a beautiful story with beautiful illustrations also by Brett Helquist. When we have time, we will have a guided drawing lesson with Mo Willems and the letters of the alphabet. We didn't have time yesterday to do the drawing for the letter c so we did it today. Your child is bringing home a picture of Charlie Brown they drew with Mo who explained how he loved Charlie Brown as a child and drew him often. Here is the short video we watched to draw Charlie Brown. Many of the lines we practiced in our Skills Units 1 and 2 are used in this character. In our Knowledge Unit, we learned about Ray Charles today. I wasn't real happy with the story in the guide so I bought a children's book about Ray Charles that we will slip in on Monday. Ray Charles starts our Friday mornings as he sings "Oh What a Beautiful Morning" for our signal to put books and reading spots away and come to the carpet. Ask me to tell you about Ray Charles.
The kids should remember Ray Charles' name because when it was time for Social Studies and I put a picture up of President Biden and asked who it was many said Ray Charles. I told you the book we read in the Knowledge part of our reading is not great! Anyway, we had to rule out other names such as President Harrison and Mo Willems, and the word empathy. I told them empathy was the most important word they would learn this year, and so it has become the default answer when they don't know! I finally had to pick up my Woo-Hoo phone and pretend to call the White House and one of my friends very enthusiastically said "She's calling Joe." We're on a first name president with Joe although we don't recognize him. We finally got around to talking about what the president does, and I gave some current events examples like about how he is helping with the recent hurricanes. I'll try and get some pictures of these rascals next week and post them so you can see them in action. They are a special little group of learners and I enjoy working with them. Have a great evening! Miss Wolfe We started the computer activities that go with CKLA Amplify, called Boost. I helped pairs of children log on, but we will work more with this later on in the week. If you still have the paper I sent home with the log on information, you could have them practice on the paper. I highlighted the letters and numbers they will need so that they won't have to hunt around so much. Getting used to finding them and remembering the numbers and word will help them to log in quicker and have a little more time working. The great thing about Boost is that it starts each child from where they are, not just all the children starting at the same point. This took quite a bit of time today!
We were able to work with the sound of o. We practiced the sound and noticed what our mouth, lips and air do when making the sound. Then we said the short a sound to compare. Mo Willems, the amazing author of The Pigeon and the Piggie and Elephant series of books, has a workshop on YouTube. Some of the videos are from his Snack Doodles series that came out of the pandemic when Mo began presenting short activities for children online. The videos are just two or three minutes, and he introduces some pretty rigorous vocabulary, then uses a letter to doodle something. Some of the letters are upper case and some lower case, so we will try and do the lower case letters as we are working with them in our Skills lessons right now. The kids are bringing home a bird on an egg, which is not one of Mo's most clever doodles, but it was perfect for getting started. Guided drawing is a great way for the children to build confidence in their drawing, and the way Mo looks at the letters and talks about what it could be is a great way of thinking about things in a different way and coming up with more than one possible response. The children seemed to like it! We started the chapter book The Wild Robot, by Peter Brown. The kids are hooked, I'm hooked, and we can't wait to read on. Because the chapters are so short we were able to read three or four. Ask me to tell you what happened so far in the story. In math we worked with story problems. We did a quick warm up with ten kids working to put the numbers one to ten in order without talking. Each actor had a piece of construction paper with one number, and they needed to line up from one to ten. It took a while, so we will try it again tomorrow with other students. The I told a story about going to a birthday party and the children had to act out what was happening with groups of them sitting down or doing different things, and the audience counting to see how many were in each group. We were checking to see that we still had ten even though we were sorting them into two groups in different ways. Have a great evening! Miss Wolfe We started blending cvc words with the sounds we have introduced so far today. We used /m/, /p/, /t/, and /a/. The children did a really great job saying each sound then blending them to discover the word. We tap our shoulder for the first sound, middle arm for the middle sound, and the wrist for the ending sound, then run our hand down our arm to blend the sounds together. We try to involve different senses and movement when learning this skill. I was hoping to have the children use sand to practice writing the words but as I left my condo this morning, I grabbed the wrong bag and brought six bottles of Diet Coke to school instead. I told the children we could use the Diet Coke to practice, but they had sense enough to decide that would not be a good idea.
In our Knowledge lesson, we worked with learning about the sense of taste. We had some lovely vocabulary words to talk about. We learned about the words flavorful, congested, saliva, pucker and taste buds. We learned that the sense of smell makes the sense of taste more potent. In fact, the sense of taste alone is the weakest of the senses, but when smell is involved the sense of taste is enhanced. The children were skeptical of this when we looked at a child plugging his nose while taking medicine. So I challenged them to try it tonight at home. The children are really doing a great job participating more. We had a little group of about five for quite a while being the only volunteers, although I would call on others to answer or share their ideas. I think they have become more confident with our picture talks, but I think what has really made a difference is the "game show" buzzers I bought. What we are working on now is listening more closely to the question before answering. The passages we are reading to the children in this part of the program are somewhat challenging. In math, we worked with ten today. We drew the counting paths we used to find the total number of items. We also worked with looking at five and counting-on from five if possible. We also have been playing a simple game of counting to ten. The children stand around the carpet, and one child starts the count, and the person next to them says the next number, until we get to ten. The child that says ten sits down. We keep going until all but one child is sitting. When we played this on Friday they were rather leisurely and weren't really paying attention closely enough, so I put a timer on them today. We still had some longer than necessary pauses. While counting to ten is easy for them on their own, listening and figuring out what comes next is a little more challenging. I repeated the game to practice staying focused and ready. Before our SEL lesson today, we had a little class meeting. We started by giving each child an opportunity to thank someone if they wanted to for something special they had done for them. I started by thanking a child for encouraging her partner to talk during our Picture Talks. When I recognized her for doing this, my little class of "copy cats" caught on and now I'm hearing a lot of encouraging and words like "what do you think?" We listened to a story The Invisible Boy, but Trudy Ludwig. This is the story of a little boy who is consistently left out of activities and a party. We talked about the word empathy again and thought about how this little boy must feel. Ask me to tell you what happens to the little boy. I was all set to begin reading The Wild Robot, by Peter Brown, today. Sadly, it was in the bag with my sand. So we listened to a picture book called The Robot and the Bluebird, by David Lucas. This is a beautiful story of an old robot who has a broken heart. He's old and of no use, so he's put on top of a huge heap of trash. A bluebird who is trying to fly south arrives and is so tired she doesn't think she can make it south. Ask me to tell you what happens and how the story ends. We are really excited to start reading The Wild Robot. I don't normally read chapter books to children because there seems to be such a rush for kids to pick chapter books at the library and miss out on the amazing picture books. Both kinds of books serve a great purpose, and honestly some of the beginning chapter books are not the best examples of children's literature, so I always want to immerse them in picture books! But last Saturday I attended an online conference, and Peter Brown was the keynote speaker. He talked about the short chapters and said he intentionally made the chapters short because when he was a student, he had a lot of difficulty reading. He learned to stop and think about what he read when reading longer texts, but he said what a challenge it was to get through a chapter. These short chapters provide struggling readers that opportunity to feel success with short amounts of text. He also talked about how this is a great book for students in kindergarten and first grade because of the short chapters. So as I often do at this conference, I opened another window on my computer and ordered it from Amazon. It's a free conference so I always rationalize the purchases I make during the conference are really like the conference fee. Have a nice evening! Miss Wolfe We had a busy morning! We started with a picture talk. I shared five photos with the students and asked them how they go together. The children talked to their partners and we added some words to the pictures to help find how the photos are connected. The children are really getting good at talking to their partners, listening to others and making some guesses. We are still getting a little bit of repetition, but I think reminding them that we are all learning together has given them more confidence to share even when they are not sure they are correct. The connection all five pictures has is the five senses, and tomorrow we will begin a new unit in CKLA about the five senses. This is a shorter unit which will be just a little more than a couple weeks. We had a bus evacuation drill this morning. The children were shown how to get off the bus through the back door if necessary. Ask me to tell you what we need to do if we can't go through the front door. We took a comprehension and rhyming test today. The children had to remember details about the nursery rhymes, vocabulary and fables to answer the questions. From what I have seen so far, the children did pretty well. These scores will be submitted to the county to be used in evaluating this new program. Other tests in the future may be used as evidence of learning. We took it slow today, and I did a little coaching of what they would need to think about as I asked the questions. The biggest problem we have is children copying from other children. I spread them out but they still were looking at other students' papers. So together, we ordered some cardboard dividers we will use in the future. This is just one way we are evaluating the students' progress.
We started a new unit in CKLA Skills today. We are now working with sounds. We worked with the m sound today, /m/. We used mirrors to see what our mouth was doing, and talked about what our teeth, tongue and lips were doing to make the sound. We also put our hand on our throat to feel the vibration when they make the sound of m. We met our Bear Buddies this afternoon. The children in Mrs. Ukhoa's class in third grade are our buddies. The purpose of today was to meet our buddy and get to know them. We also made pumpkins with them. We thought about questions we could ask our buddies, but we really had such a short period of time to make the pumpkin and get all the buddies together that I doubt there was much talking going on. Ask me to tell you who my Bear Buddy is. Some kids have two due to our class size being smaller than third grade. Have a great evening! Miss Wolfe We had a quick SEL lesson Thursday about self-control. We read the story Oh No, George! This is one of my favorite stories because George is a dog who sturggles with self-control. Ask me to tell you about the events in the story that showed George had some trouble with self-control. I hoped to follow up the story with a quick activity that called on children to sit without moving toward or popping bubbles I was spraying across the group. I had my wand ready, it was lighting up and the fan blowing, but no bubbles would come out. I took the advice of the children to bang it on my desk, but that still didn't work! We'll try it some other tiem, but the important part was that the children enjoyed the story and did a great job retelling the events in the story. We are working on trying to remember the events in order and this book was a good length to practice that! Here's a little trailer about this great book so you can see how lovable George looks! We also worked on understanding the word boast better. We don't hear that word as much these days, but we do hear brag, so we went more in-depth with bragging and/or boasting. We read a book called I'm the Best, by Lucy Cousins. This book is about a dog who brags to his animal friends that he is better than they are at different things. Ask me to tell you about what the dog thought he was the best at in the middle of the story. We are working hard in math to count accurately. We are trying to overcome the need to be first, or to count the fastest, because that is when some of the children make mistakes. We are working with different strategies to be more consistent and accurate.
Have a great weekend! Miss Wolfe We started our week looking at this Homer Winslow painting. We were looking for weather clues in the painting. Ask me to tell you what I noticed.
Monday we also worked with listening and identifying beginning sounds. We read a great book called Woodpecker Wants a Waffle by Steve Breen. This is the story of a woodpecker who smells waffles being made at a new restaurant near the forest. He tries several times to get into the restaurant to get a taste of waffles, but he is caught and thrown out every time. Finally he comes up with a plan that works. Ask me to tell you what the woodpecker did to get into the restaurant. The other animals tell woodpecker that woodpeckers don't eat waffles, and continued to come up with their own example. Lizards don't eat lasagna, bears don't eat bagels, and on and on. I gave the students the food and they tried to remember the animal who said they didn't eat that. We had a fun time remembering all the animals and the food they wouldn't eat. We also worked with learning about the DeBug strategies we can use for kid-size problems. First, the children think to be sure the problem is a kid-size problem or if they should immediately get adult help. I am very clear about children getting help when they need it, even if it is a kid-size problem until they learn to use the strategies. Then we talked about ignoring the behavior. The next thing they can try is to move away from the person who is bugging them. We talked about times this was possible, and times it was not possible so they should move on to another strategy. We will continue to work through each step, and when we finish the children will bring home a little booklet with the strategies and examples. Today we learned the Pledge of Allegiance. We went through each step and talked about the big words that were in the pledge. Children can say the pledge if they want to in the morning with the announcements. Ask me to tell you what a pledge is and to say the Pledge of Allegiance. They might need a little help with this! We also took a quick trip to the Magic Kingdom at Disney World to watch part of the Flag Retreat. I wanted the children to see adults saying the pledge, but especially to see the way the flag was taken down and folded. Have a great evening! Miss Wolfe |
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December 2024
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