News for week of 5-18-08

We had another great week! These kids are ending this year with as much enthusiasm as they began it, and it’s been wonderful to be part of. We started new centers this week and will continue them through next week. We continued with our vowel books in the ABC center, this would be a great summer activity to continue with your student. All you need is magazines, scissors, glue sticks and their books. They add pictures that correlate to the appropriate vowel sounds. It’s wonderful for reinforcing the short and long vowel sounds in words. It also clarifies the sounds for the words and the correct way to spell them if you work together with them on it. We have taken ours on vacation for a little easy down time activity that isn’t hard to pack or take-up lots of room. In the writing center we did “comic strip sequencing”, thanks to all of you who sent in your strips. We read the comics in order then cut them up. The kids then had to put them in the correct sequence from memory and write about it. It was a great activity and extended their thinking in more ways than one. In science we worked on position words. Initially, Leah and I were worried this center may be too easy…it wasn’t! They had to really think about where the animal in the picture was before gluing it. In math the kids played a fun game that was about going to a fair and buying the object on the card they picked. It was great because they got to play and have fun, but also had to buy objects with real change. It was great to watch them help each other during their games. We also played an adding game in the pocket chart area. The kids rolled dice and played an adding game with a partner. They had to say their dice in an adding sentence and use the total to color in the fish on the sheet, each student got to color in a different color on their fish.
We’re finishing our silly sounds books this week and next, so they can take them home at the end of the year.
In writing we are focusing on poetry. I’m not teaching a specific type of poetry, my goal is to get them thinking deeply about topics and use “pretty words” to develop those thoughts. They came-up with some amazing ideas, and it challenged me as a teacher, it was great! They wanted to develop a poetry book to publish also. We wrote poetry about the book we read last week The Relatives Came and decided to adapt it to poems about our relatives visiting. An interesting conversation came-up Friday morning during circle time. We started talking about Memorial Day and what we were celebrating, the kids turned it into a discussion about our freedoms and then connected it to the National Anthem. They realized that when the Star Spangle Banner was written it was the same thing that we experience today, realizing our freedom was a gift. I asked if they’d like to write poetry about it and they all got so excited, it was wonderful. I decided to teach them the technique of Haiku, to narrow their focus. The results were amazing, they loved the writing and it made the holiday so much more meaningful. I’ll be sending home their poetry in the next couple of weeks. We’re sharing them at our carpet time!
We flew planes to celebrate Lag B'Omear and I've put those photos with the shutterfly photos!
Enjoy the long weekend and beautiful weather!! Shabbat Shalom