Kacsko's Kiddos: Help Wanted

This week we studied community helpers. We read books about firefighters, police officers, and doctors. We looked behind the doors of our anchor chart to read about a new helper each day. This was an exercise in using our first two reading tools: 1)Make the first sound (of a new word) and 2) Look at the picture for help.

The students stopped on the underlined letters and made the sounds. Then we opened the door and used the picture to figure it out. Encourage your child to use these two strategies when reading with them at home. Most are not prepared to sound out entire words yet, so this is a developmentally-appropriate strategy for now.
At centers, the students got to be the community helpers we were learning about. In the blocks area, they were construction workers building with Lincoln Logs. They wore hard hats since they were in a construction zone!

In the math games center, they were dentists. Each student got their own giant mouth full of dirty teeth. They took turns spinning the spinner and brushing that many teeth clean. This game is a good introduction to subtraction.

In the number work center, the students were zoologists. The students fed all the alligators in the same way we'd been practicing on the SmartBoard game (in August). The students place the correct amount of alligator food (pom poms) on each number, then choose the correct alligator mouth to show greater than and less than.

The students were firefighters who had to get their fire engine ready to go in the puzzle center.

And our letter work center was transformed into a vet's office. Rover, the puppy, ate all the letters in the alphabet. The students had to operate, using tweezers, to remove all of the letters and place them in alphabetical order on the letter arch.

At the end of the week, the students chose which community helper was their favorite. They drew the tools they needed to do their job.

In other news, the students recited their first poem this week! The AM class recited theirs to the office staff (all the other classrooms were in an assembly). And the PM class recited the poem to Mrs. Wise's 5th grade classroom.

We have a new calendar to play with on the SmartBoard. Our calendar and games change every month to go along with the learning targets and themes in the classroom. Our first page looks like this:

The students touch the green card and it disappears to reveal the picture behind it. As you can see, we are going to start working on patterns this month. We sing through the days of the week and change the sentence at the bottom to show today's date.

On the next page, we track our days in school. We add a ones unit, change the numbers above the tens' and ones' pockets, then move the apple on the hundred chart. After that, we count as we do that many exercises.

The final page is a game that each child will get a turn to play. The student taps the interactive spinner and picks that many apples off of the tree. We started with 20 apples on the tree and zero in the basket. With each child's turn, we see how the number of apples on the tree gets smaller and the number of apples in our basket grows larger.

The next page is a link to games that we play when time permits. We played this one for the first time this week. Its a good one to play at home, too.

Next week's theme is "Where We Live" and the color for Monday is PURPLE. Here are the best of the rest. Have a great weekend!