Kacsko's Kiddos: Now I know my ABCs....

Now I know my ABCs....but first, let's talk turkey. I waited to post a blog update until today since this was a short week. But last week was all about our Thanksgiving traditions. Each day, we added to and read our Thanksgiving dinner anchor chart and practiced using our newest reading tool - Stretchy Snake.

We've been working on sounding words out for a while but mostly just isolated words, not within text. Now we are ready to move on from simply making the first sound of an unknown word and using the pictures for help. The unknown words on the anchor chart weren't exactly easy. So we learned to pick up on the pattern - the second word was always a family member's title. The last word had to be a Thanksgiving food word. This helped us narrow down our choices after making several sounds.

We made a graph to record our favorite Thanksgiving foods.

Then the students wrote about the foods they couldn't wait to eat on Thanksgiving.

As you can see from Morgan's journal, the students also wrote about who was in their family after we read the book, "Thanksgiving at the Tappletons'" by Eileen Spinelli.

The students had the chance to set the Thanksgiving table and serve the food in the blocks center this week. Mr. B (our PE teacher) let us borrow his SUPER cool play food. It feels really neat and looks SO real.

In the number work center, the students played Turkey Hunt, reinforcing ten frame recognition, addition, and subtration skills.

And here's some adorable turkeys.

The students built their own turkey in the math games center, just like the game we play during calendar time on the Smartboard everyday.

The students had to search for number pairs in the box of beans and clip them together in the fine motor/sensory center. We called the game, "Don't Spill the Beans." (And thank goodness no one did)!

In the word work center, the students had to practice sounding out words to pair them up with the pictures. Then they wrote the words onto the corresponding worksheet.

This was the first week the students didn't have a letter handwriting practice worksheet in the writing center. Now that we're finished with the letters, we get to to do more exciting things- like using magnifying glasses to spy teeny tiny words on a turkey. There were 15 sight words typed in a 6 point font hiding on the turkey's feathers. Once a student found one, they wrote it on the right hand side of the worksheet. Most of the students found and wrote all of them!

In our literacy groups, instead of focusing on a letter, we worked on recognizing, writing, and reading rhyming words; specifically those belonging to the -at, -an, -og, and -op word families.

At the end of the week, we made our Christmas hallway display using this new skill. The students cut out the candy canes, glued the word pieces on, and wrote the beginning letters to make their own rhyming words

There were a few other activities last week - pajama day was one of them.

Some of the activities we had planned for last week had to be carried over to Monday since we had that record-breaking snow day. One activity was coloring, cutting, and gluing some fun turkeys.