All about our frosty fun Wednesday...

Yesterday was a Day 5, which seems to always end up being a day that's a bit 'mixed up'. I have a prep first thing in the morning and then it is our library day. It was a frosty Saskatchewan day, so we had indoor recess all day!

For library, the students heard the story Fox and Squirrel, which teaches that we can be friends with those who are different from us. Then, we had a great math lesson. It was our first day exploring numbers through a formal lesson. I used the Math Makes Sense launch picture, which is of a variety of farm animals. Students are supposed to say how many of each animal are in the picture. To avoid blurting, and to give everyone a chance to answer, I taught them a strategy that I learnt from Whole Brain Teaching. I am not sure what it's called but I call it "Blowing Into Your Hand." The idea is that, instead of blurting out your answer, you blow it into your hand and hold your hand clenched in a fist until the teacher says "Release!", which is when student raise their hand into the air, open it, and say their answer. It works great for questions where everyone should have the same answer, and you can usually tell if someone 'releases' a different answer. After a couple of practices, they caught on and it went really well!

Then, I introduced an idea from Pinterest (love!!) to explore the number one:

After discussing all things 'one', I gave students their own "I Know Numbers 1 to 5" booklet, and they filled in the first page. Here is the example that I showed them:

 



For our PWIM lesson, students took turns pulling a PWIM word from the 'mystery bag'. If they knew the word, they could just say it out loud or they could go to the PWIM board to find the word. Then, students searched through magnetic letters to spell the word on tin stove top covers. I can't believe it, but I forgot to take pictures! After that activity wrapped up, we read L, M, N, O, Peas and played both Fastest Letter and Fastest Number in the West (pairs of students see who can say the correct letter or number on the flash card first, until there is only one student left standing).

Our day ended off with a surprise visit from the Speech and Language Pathologist, who read us two Slinky Melinky stories via the I-pad and also gave a Suri demonstration. Then we read a quick story about families to lead into our journal entry for the day. Students wrote "My Family" and the date in their journals, as well as drew a picture of their family. Here's an example of one student's work:

 

We ended the day, as usual, with our talking circle. In addition to students sharing their favourite part of the day, I am not encouraging them to reflect upon something that they learnt that day. Everyone said the same thing-- that they learnt the number one, but it's a start! :)