Five for Friday - End of September

Well I made it...barely....there seems to be a back to school bug lingering and I sent a few of my kiddos home sick this week.  We've all been a little extra cranky and tired, but it's Friday, we had fun and we are celebrating all the learning that happened this week!  

This week, we finished up our farm unit!  We read Rosie's Walk and made a map of where she went.

We read Growing Up On the Farm and compared the life of farm kids and city kids (they did this all by themselves!)

We also did some tractor painting and writing.  We used our footprints (I love painting and getting messy!) and did some guided painting.  Some kiddos listened to the guidance and little more than others!  :)  We then used our new sight word 'look' to practice writing a sentence.  We've been really working on the exclamation point and what it means when you see it, so it fun to use for this sentence!

We also began small guided reading groups this week!!!!!  This is my favorite part of the day so I was super excited!!!  While only a few of my groups are in books, we were able to play dice games and other activities to practice letters, sounds, and words.  The kiddos were excited to play!

This week I wanted to be able to hit as many skills as I can in one activity - the most bang for my buck so to speak - since we are so busy with conferences and have an extra day off school next week.  We were working on the word 'look' and really needed practice with the word 'can'.  Plus, in science we are talking about position words and an objects position relative to another object.  So....we made a class book!  I took pictures in a variety of locations around the playground and in the classroom.  I then had each student write the beginning of the sentence, "Look!  I can go ________".  The kid's were SUPER impressed with their book and themselves and now we have fun emergent reader the kids have some ownership in on the shelf in our library!

Learning sight words is HARD WORK.  To understand what letters are, that letters make a sound, that letters can be put together in different ways to make words, and that words can be arranged to make sentences is so difficult for some kiddos.  I like to give my kids as many opportunities as possible to work on building words and sentences.  As you saw in my post from last weekend, we are really working on that in my classroom.  Something we did this week as a fun and active way to practice building words is a word race.  I brought a sensory table outside that was filled with beans, walnuts and acorns and hid magnetic letters in it.  We are blessed with an outdoor classroom so we have tables and a whiteboard available outside to use.  I hung up particular sight words on the white board (each with the same number of letters) and two kiddos had to race to the sensory table and find the letters that they needed - one letter at at time.  The first to build their word won!  It was so much fun!!!!  And what a good opportunity to practice coping with losing!  :)

We have had a countdown going on for the past two weeks at my household and tomorrow, the day we've been waiting for has arrived!!!!!  I am taking my daughter Madilynn to see Disney's Princess' and Heroes on Ice!  I don't know who is more excited!  We even went and bought new shirts for the mommy/daughter date!!!  Pictures to come!  

I hope you have an enjoyable weekend with some much deserved rest!  I know I'm going to!  Cheers!

XOXO,

Racheal