ask me about friday, january 13, 2023

We had a busy, fun day!  In the morning for our picture talk, we looked at Peanuts comic strips.  We noticed the talking and thinking bubbles, and the pictures that helped tell the story.  
We learned about CUPS today.  CUPS is a way to remind ourselves of what writers need to do so a reader can read their writing.  We practiced writing a couple words, then wrote simple sentences.  We checked to see that we C:  started the sentence with a capital letter, U: wrote a sentence that made sense and could be understood, P: used punctuation at the end of the sentence, and S: the spelling was our best try.  We worked together since this was our first time using cups and to work on spacing in our writing.  We worked to be sure the letters were in the upstairs or downstairs, or their tail was in the basement, and we worked to be sure we put spaces between words.  I was doing this on the board, and the children were up close so they could copy as needed, but after we practice together a few more times, they will begin to practice this with fewer prompts and examples.  We also practiced making question marks today.
In math, we took a little break from measuring and worked with graphs.  Today we looked at pictographs and made a graph together on the Boxlite board.  We looked to see what we could find out from the data on the graph.  We will work with graphing more next week.  We also took a quick look at the greater than, >, and less than,<, signs.  Here's a quick video to remind the children about what the symbols mean.

Instead of playtime today, the children worked in groups to build towers and walls out of bathroom dixie cups.  This is an activity that many children have seen now, but when I started doing this about 32 years ago in my classroom, it took some time for the children to find out the best way to position the cups so their structure was somewhat stable.  They had a fun time today, but I was only able to get a few quick pictures.  One group came up with a tower taller than they were, but I was switching lenses, and it got touch ever so slightly and fell down.  Building with cups has so many positive lessons in it.  The children have to work as a team.  They learn to be patient as they build.  They learn not to blame anyone for the tower collapsing.  They also really notice what other groups are doing and take some ideas from them.  Hopefully we will get to where they are encouraging each other and complimenting each other for their ideas and work.  They had a great time with this.  I highly recommend this for a family activity.  The plastic cups break if stepped on so I recommend the paper bathroom size paper cups.  Our rule is they can only work with one stack at a time.  If their structure falls, they have to put the cups back in a stack before building again.  Usually it's a quiet activity, but that was not happening today!  They have been pretty noisy lately, but we'll work on that!
Here are a few quick pictures I took today:

Have a nice weekend!
​Miss Wolfe