We are quickly approaching February vacation, and the past two weeks have been jam-packed with activities! Celebrating Day 100 and Valentine’s Day, your cherubs have been incredibly busy bees!
We are finishing up with our opinion writing this week. After vacation, we will spend some time learning about persuasive writing, a tricky genre for younger minds. To help cement this concept, the kiddos will write letters to the Bus Driver (from the Mo Willems’ Pigeon books) persuading him to either allow Pigeon to drive the bus or not! Stay tuned!
Room #7’s Math Stations this week revolve around Valentine’s Day, addition, and something new: subtraction!
· Fill in the Numbers – At this special Valentine’s Day center, students filled in the numbers from 1-100 on little hearts!
· Snap-it – Working with numbers six to twelve, students made trains of cubes. They then “snap” their trains at various places. Putting part of their trains in front of them and placing the other part behind them, students figured out how many cubes were hidden. In this manner, students are learning to describe a number by its parts. For those tricky high numbers, students employed invisible buddy lines as a strategy to determine the hidden number. Fabulous work, cherubs!
· Number Cards – Using number cards, Ms. Tassone had the students build towers to match the different numbers. Then, she asked a variety of questions for students to discover the answers by using the cubes. For example: Which is greater? Which is less? How many more and/or less? What would you have to do to change your group to show the larger number? The cherubs were thinking hard!!
· Valentine Addition – Using a die, students rolled two numbers and added them together on two broken hearts to make one complete heart! For an extra challenge, students did the work a second time but used two dice to make more difficult number sentences!
· Subtraction Number Stories – At this engaging center, the boys and girls made up their own subtraction number stories using animal manipulatives and storyboards. After thinking of their story and writing down the corresponding number sentence, they shared it with me! Wowza – super impressive!
· iPad – Park Math – At this new iPad game, students worked to finish subtraction number sentences!
· Color the Numbers - At this station, the boys and girls had to follow instructions carefully and utilize designated colors for specific numbers when coloring their picture! A Valentine’s Day surprise was revealed after they finished their coloring!
The cherubs and I continue to explore how we can say words slowly to hear all the sounds. The class is learning to separate and identify the sounds, which will help them connect sounds and letters within words. At home, see how many sounds your child can identify in each word you say. So if you say, rain, your child will say r and n - and maybe even the long a in the middle. Explore with your child to see how many word beginning and ending sounds they can spot.
Additionally, Room #7 continues to learn to recognize common word patterns. This recognition helps the children to learn about writing words and to solve new words as they read. As the children break down words into patterns or parts, they can easily hear the break between the first part of a word and the rest of the word, such as h-ay, pl-ay. The pattern we’ve been studying is the –ay ending in words.
Have a wonderful, fun, and relaxing vacation! See you in a week!