Although we began the week focusing on blue, we really explored all of the colors this week. More specifically, we learned what the primary colors are and how they mix to make other colors. We didn't do much with this until Tuesday since we were missing several kiddos on Monday for the solar eclipse. That's when we did our cookie eclipse demonstration.
Also on Monday, we did our first sight word activity. We learn three-four new sight words every week. These words appear very frequently in texts, so the students learn to recognize them by sight to jump start their reading.
Monday was also our official first start to centers.
During center rotations, students join me in a reading group for one rotation. For the other three rotations, they work at "independent" centers (Mrs. Taylor walks around and monitors/helps them, and plays with them). We do centers four days a week. By Thursday, the students have come to my reading group 4 separate times to work on reading and writing. They have also visited each of the twelve independent centers.
1. Computer
2. Illustrating the book of the week
We practice reading it everyday on the Smartboard. After they color it, they place it in their book bucket which they can later read when they go to the.....
3. Reading Center (Those are their book buckets that you see on the right, with each students' picture on theirs).
4. Floor Puzzles. I have MANY to choose from!
5. Sight Word center. This is not an accurate representation of what this center will look like. We will slowly build up some regular activities that the students can choose from with which they will practice creating,building, sorting, writing, and creating sentences with sight words.
6. IPAD
7. Word Work/Letter Work Rather than working with sight words, at this center they will work with things such as rhyming words, building up words by onset/time, finding words within words, decoding games, etc.
8. Writing Center Here the students can choose from 3-4 different activities to practice writing.
The other centers not pictured in this post are
9. Kitchen/Dramatic Play area
10. Blocks
11. Tinker Table
12. Fine Motor center
I will highlight a few of those next blog post :)
Here are just a few examples of the activities the students did in my reading groups this week.
Now back to those primary colors! My goal was to allow the students to work with the colors using a different medium every day. On Tuesday we read Mouse Paint and mixed the colors using paint just like the story.
I ALWAYS demonstrate before the students have a go at it!
On Wednesday, we read
Those little circles are the characters of this sweet story. Afterward, they sort of reenacted it with an art-meets-science-meets-retelling skill activity using tissue paper.
On Thursday we read
and used the medium I associate with monsters; SLIME. They watched me make it step by step first.
Shaving cream is the key to fluffy slime.
I gave them all the uncolored slime to play with
while I went around and had each child choose the two primary colors they wanted to mix together in their slime.
On Friday, since we were finished with centers, we had time to do TWO color experiments.
First we read
then we borrowed Miss Moses' colorful sheer scarves to mimic the story. This time we didn't just use the primary colors. The story teaches how white makes colors lighter and gray/black makes them darker. It also shows how secondary and tertiary colors mix.
For our final mixing experiment, we made art a la Jackson Pollock
Except instead of flinging paint (I'm not that crazy) we let a marble and gravity do the work.
By the way, all their works of art will be on display for Family Night this coming Tuesday at school.
These first few weeks in math we have sung a lot of songs to introduce concepts such as counting, number recognition, shapes, and more/less. This one has become an instant classic
Here are a few more
Speaking of shapes, we like to do explore them with moving and shaking and hands-on activities. We go on shape hunts around the room, create them by snapping together our Geostix in small groups...
And we use our whole bodies to make them!
We have new shapes, sight words, letters, and more adventures awaiting us next week. The overall theme for next week is Alike and Different. Have a great weekend and wear YELLOW on Monday!!!
