Keep Calm and Teach On: April 2014

Monday, April 28, 2014

"Our Garden"- The Art Show Edition!

Okay, So I know I've been hinting at our school's art show for weeks now, and it's finally here! We all followed a garden theme, and it came out so much cuter than I ever thought it could.
(This was a great example for me how teachers and different age groups can come together to make something so amazing!)

I just HAVE to share some pictures, but I'll also run through at the end what each class did.

Our youngest class (infant-2.5) made: handprint flowers, painted river rocks and sprouted bean and sunflower seeds.
The toddler class (2.5-3.5) made: a footprint pond, rainbow fish, handprint flowers, footprint robins and paper plate birds
Our class made (3.5-5): giant flowers, bird feeders, pumpkin paintings, and frogs
The oldest class (5+) made: sunflowers, "stained glass" flowers and clay insects and bugs!

Welcome Spring Animals! (A, B, Pentagon, and 24)

Our theme this week was "Welcome Spring Animals" and we focused on the number 24, and reviewed the letters A and B, the color white and the shape pentagon.

We read this week: Owen by Kevin Henkes
  No More Bottles for Bunny by Bernette Ford
                              Duck and Goose: Here Comes the Easter Bunny by Tad Hills
                              Happy Easter, Curious George by Margret and HA Rey
                              Splat the Cat, Where's the Easter Bunny? by Rob Scotton

Our question of the week was "What is something that you might find in an Easter Egg?" Some of these are quite hilarious!

For our theme of the week, we walked around outside on our nature trail to see if we could spot any spring animals. We didn't see any, but we found these interesting plants that looked like closed umbrellas.

We brainstormed some spring animals and tried to call them while we were out there.

We had a rainy day this week so we decided to pretend to be a group of bears who were just waking up from their long winter hibernation. We had fun crawling around the classroom looking for a cave to make our home in and some food to eat.

To get ready for Easter, we dyed some eggs!

And we decorated our bags for our school egg hunt on Monday. I used just brown lunch bags and they decorated them with stamps and crayons. Since our egg hunt was after Easter, I made little Easter bags for my kids.

Look at these adorable little bunny baskets that another class made. So cute and so definitely stealing for next year!

Our song of the week was "Pretty Flowers" to the tune of jingle bells.

"Pretty flowers, pretty flowers,

Growing everywhere.

Here are some pretty flowers

For your coat or hair.

Pretty flowers, pretty flowers,

Gold and pink and blue.

Red and yellow, orange and purple,

I picked them just for you!"

We talked again about the color white, singing our song from this week and trying to spot things that are white in our classroom and around the school.

We talked about the shape pentagon and practiced recognizing them. I created both of this page.

When we worked on our number activities, we practiced writing the number and word for the number 24.

I made these worksheets that reinforces the one to one concept. The kids practice writing the number and have to color a square for each picture that they see.

For our letter activities, I love these pages. I meant to do one of these for each of our letter the first go-around, but I forgot. Oh well, I can always try again next year! As a small group we go over the pictures and the beginning sound of each word. The kids have to decide what starts with the letter, cut it out and glue it back on the page. We did this for the letter a and the letter b. The came from Sounds Like Fun: Phonemic Awareness.

We reviewed writing and finding the letters that we are talking about, A and B. These pages came from Letters for Little Learners.

I cut out pairs of "A" pictures and we played memory. The kids loved saying out loud the pictures of what they flipped over. I love when they are proud of themselves!

We filled a "boat" with pictures of "B" things! This came from Letter of the Week- Book 2 and was super fun.

The letter of the week books have pages that you can make a book into. I picked from both to get my "favorites". Each week, we'll work on these pages, and each child will end up with an alphabet book at the end of the year. I like to do these pages, because not only do they get more practice writing the letter, but they also have to finish the sentence on the page, which is really cool. It gets them thinking!

This week the "A" page came from Book 2,

and the "B" page came from Book 1.

The book Alphabet and Counting that we used used to turn our letters into fun animals, also has cute little tongue twisters for each letter. I printed them large and illustrated them, then I laminated them with contact paper. Using wet erase markers, we take turns finding the letters hidden!

For our sight words, we started them! Every morning we'll go over around 10 of them. Once we've mastered them, they will go on our sight word wall! So exciting!

Here is what we have mastered so far!

(We just started!)

Speaking of sight words, from Confessions of a HomeSchooler, I got these great sight word pages. We started this week with the word "am".

Saturday, April 26, 2014

The Week of The Young Child/ Hop-a-thon! (Z, 23, Oval, Purple)

Our theme this week was "The Week of The Young Child/Hop-a-thon" and we focused on the letter Z, number 23 and we revisited the color purple and the shape oval.

Our school is also getting ready for our Art Show. all the projects are completed I will take pictures and show you our super cool "Garden". It's getting exiting! This weeks little preview.... our Birdfeeders!

This week we had guest readers (parents!) come in and read us some of their favorite stories. It was so fun!

Our question of the week was "Why do you like to come to school?"

For our theme of the week, we followed the lessons given by the Muscular Dystrophy Association and talked about different aspects of muscular dystrophy. My class was very receptive to it, and had a fun time learning about it. Some lessons were, "Everybody's Different, Nobody's Perfect", "Our Marvelous Muscles", "Braces and Wheelchairs". Aboy from our school's community even came in to show us his wheelchair and talk to use about all the things that he likes to do for fun. It was great! On the last day we had our Hop-a-thon and our school raised OVER $1000. Amazing!

For the week of the young child, we painted with our color of the week, purple! To make it even more interesting, we didn't paint with a paintbrush, but with a piece of purple ribbon!

Our song of the week was "If you're happy and you know it". This one is always sure to please.

We talked about the shape oval, and practiced drawing and recognizing them. These came from this book and the book Alphabet, Colors, Numbers and Shapes.

When we worked on our number activities, we practiced writing the number and word for the number 23.

I made these worksheets that reinforces the one to one concept. The kids practice writing the number and have to color a square for each picture that they see.

For our letter activities, we used our handwriting sheet for the letter Zz from this book.

The students wrote in their journals for the letter z. It's really cool to see the children thinking about what they want to put in their journal. They love these books and always want to go through them when they're finished writing for the day.

We turned a Z into a Zebra! This book is great.

This book has great pages for helping the kids work on the letter recognition of both the capital and the lowercase versions of the letter, and they are always a little different, which is great!

We made Zip It Art! It's mess free for the kids, which is always a plus (not so mess free for me, as you can see by my arm. But we got to have fun shaking the bags and the discovering the colors that were created when our red, yellow and blue paint mixed. I chose those colors because i love color mixing, you could do this with any color paints and it would still be cool!