We have been exploring Penguins in great detail and are now moving onto our friendship and Valentine's Day theme. We are filling each other's buckets and finding new ways to be leaders in our classroom each day!
Language Arts:
While we continue our work on improving our writing skills with correct formation of upper and lower case letters, we are also developing inventive spelling as the students are able to determine how the sounds fit together to make words and sentences. I am introducing letter blends to the whole class ("ch", "sp" etc) and working on finding those sounds in stories as a part of our guided reading groups. The children are playing games to increase their familiarity with popcorn words, and enjoy using those when writing collaborative stories during center time. We also worked on Valentine journals and practiced writing words about friendship.
We have read some wonderful stories this week, including: Bring a Friend, It's Valentine's, Valentine's Day, Penguin Love, and A Story of Friendship. By including non-fiction in the collection, the students learned about the history of Valentine's Day and both traditions still celebrated today along with those celebrated long ago. They were laughing at the practice from England where the first boy a girl saw on Valentin's Day would be the person they would marry. I gave some examples and filled in various names from the class and they thought it was the funniest thing they had ever heard. "For instance, if you awakened on Valentine's Day and walked outside your house, and Mason was the first boy you saw, you and Mason would get married!".
Math:
We are all practicing our numbers through one to one correspondence counting games and are writing those as we count to 30. It's fairly common to still hear "twenty eleven, twenty twelve..." as the students practice progressing to the next group of tens. I encourage you to practice with them starting from 11 and pointing to numbers you write as they count. Give them a pad and pencil and ask for their help in making tally marks for how many shoes are in their closet or books are on a shelf. Any occasion they have to write their numbers and link the name with the number as they write is great practice. They can wrote count but applying meaning to each individual number is also important.
Science:
We continue to make predictions and test those in our classroom. Our most recent was focused on the Super Bowl. We will chart the results on Monday. We also use everyday art activities to talk about materials changing and primary colors mixing to create secondary colors. The light table has provided another center to experiment with color changes when layering Legos. The interdisciplinary nature of our classroom includes science with art and math and literacy and each activity builds on multiple skills. We also discussed shadows- see below for our Groundhog Day activity.
Fine Motor:
We created Valentine people with accordion arms and legs, allowing the students to strengthen their small muscles through folding, cutting, gluing and coloring. This activity also required them to follow three step directions to complete their project in stages. The children also practiced their scissor skills when they made fringe on the grass for their ground hog's homes, colored and cut out their furry friends and glued it all together. We included a shadow exercise to model the ground hog's excursion out of his hole, as we sang a Groundhog Day poem.
Be sure to sign up for a parent teacher conference time if you haven't already done so. There will be no school on Friday, February 17th to allow for conferences. Also, be putting together your 100 items for our "100 Days" museum this Friday. And, be on the lookout for a shoe box at home for our V-Day mailboxes. Please cover in white paper and bring to school anytime this week or next Monday.
Valentine's Day:
We will have a classroom party to celebrate on Valentine's Day. We won't have parents or guests- just games and activities between our classroom and Pre-K. Feel free to drop anything off if you want to add a treat to share. Each child will make a Valentine's Day mailbox so please send in a shoebox covered in white paper anytime this week. We have 15 children (4 boys and 11 girls) so please bring a valentine for each child in a plastic Ziploc bag next Tuesday, February 14.
Happy Super Bowl Sunday! I'm pretty neutral with the teams playing so I'll be more interested in watching a good game, the puppy bowl, and some great commercials!
Mrs. Massey
