Tuesday, October 25, 2011

A Little Bit of This... And A Little Bit of That


Amidst finishing assessments, writing reports and escaping for the weekend our poor little blog was almost forgotten! Alas, I was able to sneak in a few shots of the happenings in our class. Here is a very brief update on what we have been doing!




Earthquake Practice:
Here are a few videos of your children preparing for an earthquake. They wanted to make sure they were ready for an earthquake in all situations (hence the 3 locations) as you can tell, we had a lot of fun and are very ready!



Math:
The children are continuing to work on their number writing/recognition and counting skills with games such as Triple Roll & Record (rolling a die 3 times, writing the numeral associated with the dot pattern they rolled and adding up the dots/numerals) and Domino Addition (choosing a domino from the basket, recording the dots, or numerical value, and adding up both sides). We have also been working on finding a variety of groupings that equal 10 through the game Tiny Tumbling Town (breaking 10 into 2 groups, depending on which side of the mountain the tiny tumbler tumbles down) and Building Towers of Ten (rolling a die and finding out how many more are needed to build a tower of 10).
Through the use of Cognitively Guided Instruction (C.G.I) the children have been working on simple addition word problems (join where the result is unknown; part-part-whole where the whole is unknown) and simple subtraction problems (separating two groups where the result is unknown). This past week I introduced more complex word problems to the class that challenges their mathematical understanding of what is being asked. An example of such a problem is below:
Room 5 has a collection of __ pumpkins, ___ of them are orange and the rest are white. How many pumkins are white? 
This problem cannot be directly modeled because it is set up as a part-part-whole problem where the part is unknown. It was a great problem for everyone and challenged everyone's abilities.   

Literacy:
The children spent this week focusing on the u /u/ up sound and reading Zug the Bug and Billy the Bug and his Big Glass Jug although the stories are often based on word families, our jobs have been focused on the individual sounds. The children have been sorting pictures based on short vowel sounds, labeling pictures with simple and complex words as well as adding to our short vowel word list.

Integrated Learning:
Next week we will focus briefly on the lightly requested leaf study and wrap up our study of fall, pumpkins and apples. After conferences we will be beginning our fairy tale unit! I cannot wait to find out which stories the children want to learn about!
Photos and Such:
Here are a few snap shots of your cute children.
"Can you take a picture of us with our pens on the paper?" M.C and S.P in Spanish

We are all so happy to have Brian back! I think he is happy too! We got to play with all of his stuff!

They were quite excited to show me their Iguanas!

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