Pete The Cat

I love my brown shoes...I love my brown shoes...I love my blue shoes...I love my blue shoes...

If you are wondering what in the world I am typing about, you must read the story "Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes." and if you love it you can check out, "Pete the Cat: I love my School Shoes."

These are fictional pattern stories that come complete with accompanying rocking music that teach children rhyme and patterning. We read, sang and elaborated on Pete the Cat this week and it culminated in an art project that turned out quite adorable! We practiced our fine motor skills by cutting and folding as well as our listening and organizational skills by following 2 and 3 step directions to create our Pete the Cats. When we finished our project, we put together a class graph analyzing our shoe color data. We practiced responding to questions such as, "How many MORE blue shoes than red shoes" and then would analyze, "How many FEWER red shoes than blue shoes" practicing our math vocabulary and comparing and contrasting information no a bar graph. We then sang the song again :)
Enjoy a few photos as you kick off your weekend!
Hopefully see you at the walkathon and I have heard it will be chilly...perfect for the dunk tank :)

Noah is practicing his fine motor practice on a free app on the iPad2. He is practicing top to bottom and smooth light strokes to create letters and spell CVC words (CVC stands for Consonant Vowel Consonant) such as C-A-T and C-U-P. Noah really enjoyed this practice!

Below, Mrs. Parks is working one on one with Kirk on fine motor skills, too. It is wonderful to have parent volunteers who can work with these interactive apps and spend time teaching and learning with our Safari class, too!

Greetings Families!

We are rounding out Unit 1 in math by learning about even and odd numbers. We are learning that when you can share the numbers within a larger number equally, the number is even. We've learned that in order to share an odd number equally, we must split the final quantity in half. Here, Samedh is showing us how to share quantities equally to find if 8 is an even number! Enjoy!

What's up for the week?

This week we are very busy! I am finishing up assessments so I can start small groups in reading as well as starting parent volunteers to extend our classroom learning.

We will have our first math test next Monday and then I will group kids based on needs to where I can re-teach necessary skills.

Our school fundraising walkathon is this Saturday at 4pm in the Zeeland wetlands...rumor has it there will be a staff dunk tank! :)

This week we are starting a unit on pattern books and studying different structures in our writing. We are visiting an old favorite, "Rain" and learning how authors plan their stories before they write them by using T-Charts:

We are also doing many activities with a favorite story, "Pete the Cat" you can download the song that accompanies the story for free at the publishers website here!

Next were we will begin our study in life cycles and dive deeper into the idea of nonfiction.

We are celebrating meeting our goal of 20 minutes of read to self time by learning about a new choice during daily 5, called "be a writer." this will be a time where your child can explore many genres of writing based on interest, outside of our writing workshop time. This is a choice, so students do not have to choose this every day. I am excited for our class to start building stamina with this second choice!

Parent night is tomorrow night and I look forward to sharing my love for this grade with you and welcome your questions, comments, etc.

Have a wonderful week!

Read to Self

This is our first choice from Daily 5 where we work on growing as readers! Enjoy this video! More to come:)

Jump or Jiggle!

Yay! I figured out that the only way I can upload video is to do it on my mac, not on my iPad, which is a bummer, but will work! If you haven't seen this already, please enjoy our jump or jiggle movement poem!
Please excuse my loud voice!!