Do you know the story "Chicka Chicka Boom Boom" by Bill Martin Jr.? It's one of our absolute favourites to listen to and sing and for the last two weeks we've been practicing retelling the story with magnet letters and our very own coconut tree. Through our retells we've talked about the names and shapes of the letters of the alphabet. We've also discussed how stories have a special order that the events happen in and understand that it's important to retell stories in this same order.
If you haven't heard the story before, check out this "Chicka Chicka Boom Boom" video on You Tube where the story is sung by Fred Penner. Star Name is our weekly 'invitation' to Word Study in K1 at ISS. At the beginning of the week a new 'Star' is revealed and this week, it was Emma! Emma has three letters in her name -- E, M, and A -- that all make different sounds. We learned some actions to represent these sounds and talked about other words that have these same sounds. We also focused on the 'form' of the letters, brainstorming what their shapes reminded us of and learning to write the letters in D'Nealian style. We practiced tracing and writing letters in our Word Study notebooks and made sand letters for our personal sand tracing books. One of our favourite Star Name activities this week was thinking up questions to ask Emma in an interview which we did over Skype because she was at home sick. What a great time we've had with Star Name this week so far! I wonder who will be next week's 'Star'? If you want to see more about our interview with Emma and the Star Name activities we did this week, check out the documentation below: We're very lucky that our classroom opens right out into the playground, so we've been taking advantage of this and doing lots of numbers practice outside. We've traced numbers in the sand, written them with chalk, hopped along them, and thrown bean bags on them. Every day we're becoming more and more confident with our numbers! We also practiced sorting some of the natural materials, recording our thinking with photographs and words on the app "Haiku Deck": Since the beginning of school we've been exploring the different ways that items and materials can be sorted into groups. This is an important strategy and skill for us to build as part of mathematics and word study. Check out our Fotobabble recordings to see the ways we've thought of sorting our materials so far. Can you think of any other ways? Last week we met Ms. Skrtic and our Grade 3SS buddies. We knew our new friends a little bit through their blog and our Twitter chats, but we hadn't officially met them until last Thursday. We invited 3SS to our classroom to play with us and what a great time we had! We can't wait to see them again soon! This week our classmate Emma has been sick at home. We have been missing her a lot and wishing that we could talk to her. We discussed what we could do to send her a message and had the idea to write her a letter! We wrote one letter as a whole class and learned about the different parts of a letter like the date, the greeting, and the sign-off. We also wrote individual letters where we included our own personal drawings and practiced writing our own name and Emma's name. After writing our letters we put them into an envelope that we coloured with crayon. Of course the envelope then went into our class mailbox to be delivered to Emma! We played a fun game this week that practiced our one-to-one correspondence (matching each member of one set to members of another equal set) and counting abilities. We rolled dot cubes to find a number between one and six. Some of us got really fast at seeing what number we had rolled and didn't even need to count the dots! Of course, we did try to double check though. Once we discovered what number we had rolled, we counted out an equal set of objects. We used stones, counting cakes, frogs on a log, cars and people, and jewels to count our sets. We've been thinking a lot over the last couple of weeks about what kind of things are important for us all to stay safe and happy together in our classroom. After a few discussions we thought of some simple agreements. We gave our handprints and signatures showing our promises to remember these important things. Of course we're also always sure to remember the 4 Be's of ISS:
Can you see any connections between the 4 Be's and our Class Agreements? |