Spetember 14, 2012

Whew, what a busy week!

Today in skills, the Screaming Mustaches did a review game where they rolled a big dice, moved to a sound, and spelled a word with that sound in it.  The sounds they reviewed were /oo/, /oi/, /ou/, /or/, /ar/, and /er/.  They played outside and the wind threatened to spoil the game, but everyone was very resourceful and we managed to make it through.

The Zesty Wombats also played a game, though theirs was inside.  They played a board game checking their ability to discriminate between soft and hard c.  Today was the last day to work on soft and hard c and g, but we'll definitely continue to refer to it.

The Ice Dragons nearly finished their Jigsaw Jones mystery.  They know all about suspicious behavior on the part of some of the characters and on Monday they should see it solved.

The Organic Squirrels are just about finished reviewing how to blend and segment short vowel sounds.  That means they can put words together and take them apart (sounding out c-a-t as cat and also taking cat and stretching it into c-a-t).

In centers today the kids finished their week long mini-unit on discriminating between b and d.  They did a word sort, sorting by initial consonant.  They also reviewed the tricky words no and of.  They learned another calming strategy, this time a song to help them be calm.

In curriculum project the first graders got to see a monarch butterfly hatch out of its chrysalis.  How lucky!  They are working on continents in curriculum.  The second graders are learning about Hinduism. Today they started mini-art projects surrounding either the holy place (Ganges River), holy text (the Vedas), some of the gods (Vishnu, Shiva, Brahma), or someo f the principles (Dharma, Brahman, reincarnation). 

In writing today we worked a bit more on the sentence.  The kids learned about subject and predicate and we reviewed that (subject is who the sentence is about and predicate is what they do).  Then they unscrambled a sentence and underlined the subject once and the predicate twice.  The second graders turned their simple sentences into juicier sentences.

We started our read aloud book today.  We're reading Haroun and the Sea of Stories, which is a book about the importance of stories.  It's one of my absolute favorite books, full stop - not just out of kid books, but out of all books.  Its language is so vivid and its adventure and excitement reel the readers in.  I read it to my class two years ago and at the end of the year last year I had a few kids who remembered it so vividly that we retold the story to each other in great detail.  I'm so excited to be able to share this book with the class.

With our first full week behind us, we all deserve a relaxing weekend.  Enjoy!