This week has been full of fun, fall activities! The boys and girls were eager to talk about leaves and pumpkins. We have had many conversations about items one would see in nature during this autumn season. Room #7 also conducted a lot of measuring exercises with the pumpkins obtained during our fieldtrip. We noted that all the pumpkins have different sizes, and then we measured how tall and how round they were! The kids were excited to compare their results with their table friends.
We are moving along in our Daily Five learning! This week, a new component of the Daily Five was introduced – Work on Writing! When students are engaged at this center, they have a variety of choices for their writing activity from which to choose. Students can decide to continue working in their Writer’s Workshop folders or they can select from a myriad of other subjects. Here are some topics that we brainstormed:
– Write a list (shopping list, birthday present wishes, friends, animals, toys, etc.)
– Write a card
– Write a letter
– Write a story
During each one of these brainstorming sessions, we discovered an endless list of topics! We also created an “I” chart where students named expected behaviors to demonstrate while at Work on Writing. The boys and girls are beyond excited to get started next week!
This week’s Math Stations –
· Geoboard Exploration – Let the shape exploration begin! Using geoboards, students made various shapes (triangles, hexagons, squares, octagons, etc.!) with rubber bands. What fun!
· Guess the Next Number - At this center, the children first lined up number cards from 1-15. Next, the kiddos closed their eyes, and I turned over various cards so that they could not see their numbers. When they opened their eyes, they used their knowledge of one more and one less to predict what the turned over cards were! Everyone did a magnificent job with this activity!
· Make a Train Race – Working with a partner, kiddos took turns rolling a die and making a cube train. The first person who reached the number 15 won the race. In this manner, students not only practiced their counting skills but also were required to keep track of how many cubes they already had as well as figuring out how many more they needed in order to reach the specified length.
· Build a Staircase (to 9!) – Continuing this station from last week, the children received extra practice at this tricky center!! Not only did the kiddos use number dice to increase their number recognition but also had to build the staircase to 9! They had to choose which die to use (1-6 or 4-9) depending on what they needed in their staircase. Working with a partner, the boys and girls of Room #7 took turns rolling a die. They then stacked cubes together to represent that number. Once the partners finished building their staircases (1-9), they took turns rolling the die to disassemble them!!
· Spin and Sort Pattern Blocks - Given a spinner with the following options: 3 sides, 4 sides, and 6 sides, the students sorted the shapes on their sorting mat. In this activity, everyone had to identify which shapes had that many sides. They also received continued practice naming the various shapes.
· Build a City - This partner activity had students building towers depending on the roll of the die. When their game was over, they had built a “city” of skyscraper towers! This week, the cherubs had an extra challenge. They connected all their towers, counted and decided which one had more cubes and which had less. If students had trouble counting that high, they compared the 2 towers by standing them up next to each other and comparing which one was more or less and by how much!
This week, we talked A LOT about teen numbers, both how you form them as well as what they mean (e.g., 11 is 10 + 1). This will take a lot of practice, but once the skill is cemented, students will have a more solid number sense of what constitutes a number. It can often be tricky to remember which number comes first in the teens. In order to help the students remember how these numbers are formed, we listened to and sang a new song. Go to the following link to hear the fun rap! You can even sing it at home!
http://reallyroper.blogspot.com/2011/01/numbers-in-teens-they-start-with-1-song.html?m=1
Afterwards, partners worked together to order numbers one through twenty, and they even noticed some patterns that popped up when seeing them in a line!
During Learning Labs this week, I introduced a project for our Math Center. At this center, students worked to complete unique pumpkin glyphs. Last Friday, students painted their very own pumpkins, mixing yellow and red to make orange. This week, they created jack-o’-lanterns out of these pumpkins. The students individualized their pumpkins according to the rules of the glyph. For example, if a student is a boy, he cut out circle eyes. If the student has 2 syllables in his/her name, then he/she cut out a happy mouth. The students will continue with this project next week, but they had a blast working to construct pumpkins that reflected parts of their own identity!
We have been talking about syllables in class! Wowza! Room #7 discussed how every word is made up of parts, or syllables. We figured out how we can discover how many syllables a word has by putting our hands underneath our chins to see how many times our chins move when we say the word. Next, we did a picture sort to see if the word had one, two, or three syllables! The kids did a fantastic job with this! We will continue our syllable finding with poems we read, morning message, and our Alphafriend songs! It’s a great game to play at home as well!
On Friday, I introduced Superflex to the students! We read a book about how everyone has his/her very own Superflex inside, and it helps to defeat Unthinkables! The first Unthinkable they met was Rock Brain. Rock Brain makes you get stuck on your ideas and not be flexible. For example, if a student plays a game and really wants the blue marker as his game piece and will not choose any other color, then this student has Rock Brain. In order to defeat Rock Brain, it is important to think of another way to solve the problem and try to “go with the flow”.
We will continue to work with Rock Brain over the next couple of weeks, and the class will learn more about him through various activities!
I hope many of you were able to come and enjoy the Halloween parade on Friday morning! Room #7 boys and girls were eager to show off their costumes and fall colors as well as their songs! They did an amazing job!