The kiddos in Room #7 are beyond excited about our new student, Rose! They are being great friends and helping her to learn the ropes of Room #7! Welcome Rose!
Room #7 has officially begun our chick unit! The kids couldn’t be more excited. On Monday, after reading the book Chickens Aren’t the Only Ones by Ruth Heller, the class discussed a new vocabulary word: oviparous! This fun word to say means to hatch from an egg. Then the class did a sort of various animals and insects to decide which were oviparous and which were not. This conversation segued into which creatures are mammals AND how one can tell what a mammal is. Ask your child to tell you which animals are mammals and which are oviparous! You’ll be surprised by their answers. After spring vacation, we will obtain chick eggs from a local farm! Stay tuned for more information!
As Room #7 continues to delve into number sentences and comparisons, we are also investigating shapes, both 3-dimensional and 2-dimensional. Have your child try to find the following shapes in the real-world; they are everywhere: cones, spheres, prisms, cubes, and cylinders. Ask them to tell you about what we found in the classroom!
· Build a Floor – A tricky, new station that the kiddos loved! The object of this partner game is to be the first to complete a “floor” made from Unifix cube trains lying side by side. Each train had to be made from cubes of two colors. This week, the students worked with the target number of 6. In the first stage of the game, the cherubs took turns rolling a number cube to determine the length of the first color of each train. Then, in the second stage of the game, they again took turns rolling the cube to complete their own floors, placing the indicated number of cubes (the second color) wherever they could on the board. The second number needed to combine exactly with one already on the board to finish one train! This was complicated work, but they rocked it!
· Fill the Hexagons – With what different shapes can you make a hexagon? At this center, everyone rolled shape dice to determine how to fill in their hexagons. This center really inspired the kids to think critically and carefully to see where they could fit each shape!
· Pattern Block Puzzles – The purpose of this station was to give the cherubs the opportunity to explore relationships of shapes and determine how many ways the shapes can be arranged in a particular space. Using pattern blocks, the boys and girls filled in a particular puzzle shape in several different ways and recorded the number of blocks used each time!
· Geoblock Match-up – This week, the students observed some three-dimensional geo-blocks. We talked about how these blocks have faces. The faces are common shapes that the students see every day (squares, triangles, and rectangles). In this game, the students received a geo-block game board. Their job was to reach in the basket, pick out a block, and determine if any of the faces matched a shape on their board. The complicated part of this game was that many of the shapes had different shaped faces. For example, some triangular shaped geo-blocks had rectangular faces as well. It was tricky!
· Geoboard Designs – At this center, I built a variety of designs and shapes on a geoboard for the boys and girls to observe and copy. This station really helped them be more analytical about the various parts of a design or shape and its position on the geoboard. The kids thoroughly enjoyed this station, especially when the designs got super complex!
· Wall Game – At this center, the kids worked with the number ten. After arranging a vertical line of cubes of that number, a teacher “walled” off a portion of their line so only a certain number of cubes was visible. The children then predicted how many cubes were over the “wall”. What a fun way to see the different number combinations!
· 3-D Shape Color - The boys and girls did an outstanding job recognizing what each shape was called at this center and then coloring that shape accordingly!
In class, the children are learning about the structure of words and how some words are related to each other. This recognition helps them break down new words to solve them. We’ve been focusing on adding ‘s’ to a noun to make more than one. The boys and girls and I talked about how sometimes that ‘s’ can sound like a ‘z’ and to be careful word detectives when writing those plurals!
Have a wonderful weekend!