ask me about friday, September 13, 2024

We started our day looking at these little cuties!  One of the skills we work on during our Picture Talk time is noticing details in the pictures and photographs.  I am guiding the children to look closely at different parts of a picture, or in this case the spiders, to notice things like the segemented legs, the eyes, the colors, etc.  Giving students the time to think first helps them to prepare what they will talk to their partner/s about, a rehearsal, for then sharing with the whole group what they noticed.  These thinking and speaking skills are important in all areas of the curriculum, and it's a fun way to start our day and get our brains ready for what we will be learning.  Today, we were working with Little Miss Muffet, so this was a great opportunity to look at some unique spiders.  One of these spiders was named the cutest spider in a contest, and one was identified as an outstanding mother.  Ask me to tell you about the spiders and which one is my favorite.
We worked with the nursery rhyme Little Miss Muffet today in reading.  We talked about vocabulary in this rhyme before we started to help understand the rhyme.  We talked about curds and whey, which we compared to cottage cheese, and we looked at a picture of LIttle Miss Muffet and listened to the first part of the rhyme to help the children guess what the word tuffet means.  We identified the events, the things that happened, in the rhyme.  We found the rhyming words in the poem, then had a little fun making our own LIttle Miss Muffet rhyme.  We substituted words for tuffet, curds and whey, and spider.  For example, the new version might be "Little Miss Muffet, sat on a beach chair, eating a hot dog and fries.  Along came a hermit crab, and sat down beside her, and frightened Miss Muffet away!"  We didn't worry about rhyming words, we just came up with original ideas.  The children drew a picture to illustrate their Miss Muffet story.  I tested while the children worked on their own.  They are doing so well making a quick, smooth and quiet transition to their seats.  They are, for the most part, working quietly without yelling out that they are done just minutes after starting.  They know they need to work the whole time.  This helped me get more testing finished.  I still have more but should be done in the next day or two.
In math, we are working with hidden partners within numbers to five.  We practiced counting on our fingers the math way, then worked with showing numbers to five with our fingers in other ways, for example two fingers and three fingers.  We worked then with cubes to show hidden partners.  

Have a nice weekend!
​Miss Wolfe