ask me about Friday, october 28, 2022

We enjoyed another story about a character we read about earlier in the year named Yoko.  Today we read Yoko's Show and Tell, by Rosemary Wells.  We were listening to learn more about the main characters in the story.  Ask me to tell you about Yoko and the Franks. ​We were working on thinking of three words to describe each character.  We are working to think more deeply than just what they look like, so we thought about their character and actions in the story.  Then, we picked a fiction book and drew a picture of one of the characters, then drew three little pictures or wrote a word, or did both, to describe the character we chose.  This is building on what we did earlier in the year, which is what Benchmark does all year.  The lessons build on each other and spiral throughout the year. 
We are working on building a strong memory.  We have been working on answering questions in complete sentences from our Really Great Reading, but I've been surprised at how many children need reminders about the name of the character in the little story.  It changes every day with every story, but the name is in the story many times, then we all answer the first 12ish questions together, but when the children have to answer on their own, they might forget the character's name.  To building that memory strength, we played a memory game.  I flashed nine pictures on the screen for 45 seconds.  Then the children went back and quickly sketched all the items they remembered.  I organized the pictures on a grid which I thought might make it easier for them to remember or use a strategy to remember.  Here's the picture the children studied:

---

I talked to the children about only using a pencil and just sketching the pictures.  I chose mostly pictures that would be important to the kids.  We talked about not coloring or adding a lot of details to these, but to get the pictures drawn so they could remember as many as possible. Ask me to show you my Memory paper!

In math, some of our students acted out a story.  We were working with a group of ten and were looking for hidden partners in our story.  The actors and the audience enjoyed themselves!  The highlight of the story was when one of our actors ad-libbed as we sang Happy Birthday.  I neglected to tell the actors and audience the name of the character whose birthday party our actors were going to, so when we got to "Happy birthday dear..." and one of the actors sang "random birthday kid." 
We learned about the /y/ sound today.  Ask me to yodel!

Have a great weekend!
Miss Wolfe