ask me about thursday, october 1, 2020

Today we read an information book about school rules.  We did a preview of the text first and looked at text features.  I went through the text features to show the students what they were and to get them familiar with the name of them.  We talked about the table of contents, bold print, headings, captions and labels.  We also looked quickly at the glossary and index, but we will focus on the first set of text features for now.  We also talked about how information books usually, but certainly not always, have photographs.  We reviewed school rules, but the book was about school rules in school, so we talked about our online rules.  We made a web to organize the rules we shared.
We practiced our red word am and did arm tapping.  In Orton Gillingham, they use arm tapping for several reasons.  First, usually the children will have the word written on paper that they will hold in their ""other" hand, not the hand they use to write.  They take the hand they write with and cross their mid-line and tap from shoulder to hand saying each letter to spell the word, then they sweep their hand down their arm and say the word.  We practiced this today with am as well as can for extra practice learning the drill.  As more words and letters are added to our drills, and the children are more familiar, the drills will be faster.  
In math, we looked at counters in different formations to understand that just because they are moved around or farther apart, their quantity remains the same.  This is a conservation task, but we also showed how many with math fingers so the children didn't recount.  We are also working with subitizing so the children can look at  a group of counters or dots and not have to count each one.  Research shows that usually the children can see three or four easily, but then their number sense helps them to know the quantity with larger groups.  Today we were spacing the counters out in parts of a work mat which is building that foundation for recognizing quantity without counting even when we are using quantities greater than four.  
Have a nice evening!
​Miss Wolfe