Welcome Back!

While one of my student's lamented today, "I love breaks!", it was still great to be back in the classroom. We had one loss: one fish didn't make it through the break (back down to two!). We also gained two new plans. They got a lot of sun today, while the cold winds outside kept us inside all day.

I set out some invitations to learn this morning during their free choice center. I attempted to fill up glass jars with different amounts of what to test the questions, "Can you make sound with water?" However, they were tiny jam jars and did not really get my point across. That was short lived, but I did bring out all of our instruments, plus some extra, and a few students were quite engaged with making many sounds with those!

I was excited to share Chester's adventures over the break. I created a book called "Chester Goes to The Farm" with pictures and simple sentences that the student's can read in their own time. I read it to them as an introduction to our journaling lesson today. Students were asked to represent with picture and words the best part of the week off. They practiced writing the date, gave their journal entry a title ("My Break"), and then wrote "The best part was..." They drew a picture and then shared with a helper their complete thought, and were assisted with finishing printing their sentences.

During math, we discussed shapes and sorted out some characteristics about each shape. We also read a story about shapes that showed pictures of shapes that we see in every day life! We were going to work on shape sorting but ran out of time, so we will save that for another day.

 

 

In our science class, we continued on with the morning's exploration of sound. I made cup telephones for the students to try out. They had never tried them before, so it was quite fun! Then we worked as a group to brainstorm everything we know about sound and what some sources of sound are. Student's then worked individually on 'What makes sound?" sheets.

 

For our word work today we read a beginner sight word story "Farm Animals" that follows the format of "I see a...". Then we rotated through two centers using Handwriting Without Tears materials. Center 1 was about using straight and curved wooden pieces to build letters. Center 2 had students rolling out play dough to make letters with guided matts.

 

During the talking circle, everyone shared that they had a great day back. I agree!