We're RRRRACING through November at warp speed! This week's letter focus was R and our room was filled with talk of rainbows, rockets and robots!
R is for RHYMES! We were rhyme detectives this week, listening for rhymes in the stories we read together, making up silly rhymes with our names and even going on a rhyme scavenger hunt. Learning to identify and generate rhyming words is an important building block on our journey of becoming readers and writers. I would encourage you to start talking about rhymes with your child at home. Point them out in the stories you read together and have fun making up silly nonsense words.
We've learned so many letters that we can start using them to make words! We are learning to listen for a beginning, a middle and an ending sound when we create simple 3 letter words and had fun practicing this skill on the SMARTboard. We used our new rhyming skills to help us generate as many 3 letter words as we could using only the letters we have learned so far (P, M, H, F, S, A, C, T and R). Try this as a family challenge this weekend! How many 3 letter words can you make using only these letters?
We're learning to become authors! We have a very popular new book-making centre that generated a great deal of excitement this week. We learned that authors write books about things that they know a lot about. Each child had an opportunity to sit in the author's chair at the end of the day to share their completed books with their classmates. They were SO proud of themselves!
We learned a new math game this week called Lucky Number! This was a hit! They had so much fun with it they were completely unaware of how many math skills they were learning :) This game helps to reinforce the early number concepts of subitizing (recognizing the number of objects in a set without counting) and printing numbers to 6.
On our early dismissal Friday, the afternoon kiddos created the most adorable astronaut artwork!! I will definitely be finding some time to do this with the morning class as well. How cute are these?!?
Have a wonderful weekend everyone!! Can't wait to see you all again on Tuesday!
Love,
Miss Roberts
Here's what the kiddos were up to with Mrs. Planden this week...
What a Monday!
We began our day with chalkboards, chalk and dominoes. Some friends used their dominoes to tally up the dots on the entire piece (finding the sum) while others chose to write the number represented in dots on each side of the domino. After this free exploration with the materials, we then began talking specifically about the concept words BEFORE and AFTER. I asked them to then draw the numbers that occur before and after the numbers they were given. This is something that most kids would benefit from further practicing at home. If you choose to practice this with your child, create a number line of some sort for them to use to support this skill that you can gradually take it away as they become more and more confident without tools. In class I added a bit of a continuum on the number line as a visual to show them that before comes first on the left and after comes next on the right. This can be a simple hand drawn list of numbers from 0-10.
We then read a book as a group and began talking about measurement. We used words like taller and shorter, full and empty, long and short, big and small, heavy and light. We discussed all the times in our lives we have measured or have seen the adults in our lives measuring, and I would love it if over the coming weeks you could point out all those times you are measuring in your day-to-day lives, especially with the baking I would imagine that will be occurring in the coming month of December!
We ended our day reading the story "Swirl by Swirl" which examines the many examples of Spirals that occur naturally in nature. We also discussed how math is the examination of patterns! I set up a centre for them to use the following days to examine patterns in nature and to explore the spiral shape, encouraging them to look closely at the objects that they see.
Additionally, I put out a centre for kids to make snakes using cards and put out some plastic links for them to informally measure the lengths of their snakes and to use the words longer and shorter. I also put out a ruler as a nudge into exploring actual units of measure, but the focus for the time being will be completely on measuring things 'informally' which I will touch more on next week.
Finally, when I saw the amazing photos on the blog of all of the space explorations that the kids were having I knew I had to bring in my 'Space Blocks'. (Which are really just cardboard boxes covered in mirrored duct tape but don't tell the kids!! haha) as well as a mirrored-duct tape Lazy Susan so they can make aspects of what they build spin. It was so fun watching kids build spaceships, rocketships and work together on their creations.
What a busy day!! See everyone on Monday!
Mrs. Planden
