Tuesday, March 3, 2015

Good times to be had tomorrow!!

Woohoo! We're headed to the cookie factory!

I have never been there before, but I'm excited to go.  I've wanted to for a while, but I will say that I'm not that thrilled with Moravian cookies.  Don't get me wrong! They ARE delicious, but they aren't that tempting for me.  Now sugar cake on the other hand...
MMMM!





What we did today:

Reading:  Today we continued with our unit titled, "I Think I Can."  We finished reading our story about The Little Engine That Could.  We also learned some more about trains and practiced our /aw/ word sounds and spellings (au_, aw, al).  

Here is a song we starting learning today about trains: 

It's by Elizabeth Mitchell, a children's song musician.  I LOVE her music.  It's so simple and mellow.  

Guided reading:  In guided reading today we started reading, Not Enough Snow, a book I printed from readingatoz.com (our school has a subscription - LOVE this site!!).  We started with a picture walk, the kids then read the book to themselves after we made some predictions, and then we did a practice TRC question.  I found some generic TRC question stems teacherspayteachers.com that are ready to fill in with book titles and character names.  We talked about restating the question in our answers, using details, and documenting with page numbers.  We're working on it! If they can just continue to get better with this written comprehension portion I think we'll really see their reading levels take off by the end of the year.  

Math:  Today we did some whole class learning by practicing using the flipchart I made of 3rd quarter concepts.  We're practicing word problems that include addition and subtraction of multiples of ten (such 70 - 30).  The kids are getting better at coming up with math strategies to use, especially the quick drawings.  I would like to see them think about the hundreds chart and number lines a little more, but this really just tells me that I need to show these more often (I tend to automatically go to the quick draw).  
     We also started talking about 1/2s and 1/4s today and how to draw these on shapes.  And we are also continuing to work on doing ten more and ten less of any number up to 120 in our heads.  Today we also played a math game (sorry, no pictures!) on comparing numbers.  I paired the kids up and they took turns rolling 2 die.  They wrote down their numbers and then compared them using <, >, or =.  I think it was a hit.  

Social Studies:  Still working on George Washington... The kids seem to really be interested in this unit.  We had a short discussion today on why George Washington wanted us to be independent.  The kids were shocked that we had to pay taxes to England but not get to pick our leaders in the government.  I at first thought this would be way over their heads, but they really seemed to get it, which even showed from their work on a worksheet where they had to write facts they had learned so far about George Washington.  The president rap song also continues to be a hit and they ask to play it at least once more each time.  

Other:  Our special today was computer.  We did recess indoors today because it was only 39 degrees.  We tried to play gonoodle.com but, again, something was up with the internet connection or something, so I played some Just Dance Kids videos off YouTube.  We also spent some time this afternoon working on our George Washington word search and reading silently to ourselves (ten minutes is the MAX that we're able to do this quietly right now).  

Out of the habit of doing:  That crazy snow! I've realized that I've gotten out of the habit of reading aloud.  The missing school days have really hindered my maintenance of good habits.  Well, and I've also run out of Junie B. Jones books to read.  I'll have to find another series for the kids to enjoy.  I also have bought A TON of books from ebay for our classroom library!! I'll have to dig through those and find some to read out loud.  
     No centers today.  Where does the times go?  

 Check out how cold it was here 2 weeks ago! Bone-chilling cold for us.  And that was the true temperature and not even the wind-chill.  

Here are a couple of new items we have now in our classroom:

The first is a phonics game mat I bought off of Zulily.  It's a little to low in level for my kids right now because it focus on letter sounds.  But I think it would be a perfect game in a center at the beginning of the year.  

The second is a calendar my pastor's wife made.  It's hanging on the back of our classroom door now.  Cute! All of the pieces are made using buttons.  : )

Here are some pictures of our writing time in February.  We were working on an informative writing piece about Martin Luther King, Jr.  The kids listened to a story about Dr. King, then they filled in a graphic organizer using 4 facts, and then they had to write 6 sentences, including a topic and closing sentence.