Happy Monday! We are off to a great week of learning, beginning with the letter "o"! Ask your child to tell you the "secret story" about the letter o and the two sounds she can make when she is in disguise or when she is being a super hero!
The students were word detectives playing our new Boggle wall game!
We practiced our sight words by playing memory.
We made "short o" books.
We found and wrote about short o words.
We started a new math chapter today about number stories. We acted out number stories and told them to each other as we solved them.
We got exercise while we practiced our sight words during our sight word fitness video.
Today, during music, the students practiced retelling literature with instruments!
This week we did not add a new letter but we did teach two new sight words! We are studying "where" and "there". We discovered so many things about these two words. Some of our observations were:
- "Here" is hiding inside of both of those words!
- Another student observed that both words were the exact same except for the beginning letters of each word.
- We saw an "ere" pattern.
In order to help the words sink into our brains we gave each word some hand movements. Every time we read the word "there", we pointed at something. Every time we read the word "where", we put our hands to our foreheads as if we were searching for something. Try it at home together!
Here is a quick, fun song to help you practice the word "there".
This week we celebrated the talented author Jan Brett by reading her beloved stories, The Mitten and The Hat. We did SO many fun activities with these stories; here are just a few! In The Mitten, a boy named Nikki wanted his Baba to sew him some snowy, white mittens. Reluctantly, she agreed even though she warned her grandson that the mittens might get lost in the snow. Sure enough, he loses a mitten and some clever animals decide to climb in and make it their home.
In conjunction with our math lessons this week, we used the characters from The Mitten to write an equation with a combination to 5.
We laced our own mittens and cut out all the animals in the story, "The Mitten" in order to practice retelling the story.
After reading the story once and getting our "retell mittens" ready. We watched Jan Brett read the story as we "acted" out the story with our mittens. You can watch the video here!
Here we are making our animals climb in the mitten!
Those sneaky little animals!
The students were thrilled to use their NEW "big kid" journals. We wrote "opinion" pieces about the snow. Kimberly wrote that she loved the snow because she can make a snowman with "accessories".
Our next Jan Brett book that we studied this week was "The Hat". This is a delightful tale about some silly animals who steal some clothes from a clothing line and they wear the clothes as a hat!
We became fashion designers as we created our own articles of clothing for the clothing line in "The Hat".
After designing our own clothes, the students were ready to take to the "stage" to act out the story.
Look at those beautiful woolens!
Averie made a cute little Hedgie and Mrs. McLean was our first narrator!
Those silly animals all stole the clothes!
More silly animals!
The students came up with their own animals to crawl into the mitten.
It's January, and we're off and running with our learning! Is there anything better to do in this blustery weather than curl up with a good book? Oscar was re-reading the book Snowmen At Night in our book nook during Daily 4!
We got silly with our spiral notebooks today and wrote sentences by including as many sight words as we could in one sentence!
We got some great sight word practice by playing our Snowman Sight Word game! Students strengthened their fine motor muscles by placing a "snowball" on the correct sight word.
As we get back into the swing of things, we are reviewing all of our letter sounds and sight words that we have learned. Here are two videos we sang along to help us practice. The sight word song includes SOME words that we have NOT taught, or perhaps won't be focussed on this year, but it's still good practice to introduce. Most of the words on the video are words that they know :)
It's fun to do the moves with the song; it wakes up the brain and adds another dimension to the lesson.
As I mentioned before, some of these words have NOT been taught, but that's ok!!!
