Week in Review!
Hi friends! How was your week? Mine was great! I’m WIPED out, though! The past 10 days have held Parent Conferences, Report Cards, SNAP meetings where we discuss each students’ progress, and so much more! It has been crazy!! This week, our Superintendent visits classrooms and it’s Red Ribbon Week. So you can rest assured that my kids will be in rare and WILD form for his visit, haha!!
Just wanted to stop by and show some pics from our weeks and a few easy to implement ideas! 🙂
If you follow me on Instagram, you already saw our door for Red Ribbon Week. I’m seriously so proud of it! I try not to do too many pre-created crafts because I just love their art so much. We did an easy directed drawing of Pigeon. He’s so easy to draw! I love it!!
Then they just wrote a few sentences about not doing drugs. FORTUNATELY, my babies don’t have much schema about illegal drugs, haha. We talked about how it’s bad things you put in your body so I had a kid tell me “don’t eat drugs!” when I snuck a piece of chocolate. NOT sure how to handle that, hahah.
The bottom one doesn’t even look like Pigeon but I love him because he said “he’s an ostrich!” hahaha. That he is little friend! Plus I love his writing!
In Math, we have been busy using my Spooky Sums addition stations. They are loving them. We don’t do math tubs everyday…I just build it into my plans a few days a week depending on that week’s lesson.
For this station, they can use math manips, their hands, or draw a picture to solve the addition problems and write the sum in the box. They love this one!
Counting on is SUCH an important skill. I feel like in the past, I didn’t do a good job of actually teaching it. My higher kids always figured it out, but I didn’t do enough modeling of it and practice. So this is a super easy station and they are really loving it!
For this, they grab some little candy cards out of a basket. You could totally use real candy for this, too! Then they draw what they drew and write the number sentence.
One of our favorite games is Roll and Color. I think I have a version for every possible holiday, haha! they just roll 2 dice and color the sum. I don’t think this is crazy hard BUT I think it helps them develop their facts They see the same number combos over and over so it’s a really authentic way to get great fact practice.
I’m so mad at myself that I forgot to take a picture of the recording sheet. They drop 12 (or however many you decide) counters on the web and write a number sentence for counters IN the web and counters OUT of the web. It’s just like Counters in a Cup if you’re familiar with Investigations.
We also have read some great books this week! I have a really large Indian population at my school and they were so excited because it’s their holiday, Diwali this week! It was on Thursday but different families celebrate it for several days. We read this book to celebrate! 🙂 Ganesha is a Hindu god that breaks off his tusk to finish writing the story of creation. The book takes the traditional tale and writes it in a kid-friendly little story. And the illustrations are GORGEOUS. I mean seriously…I can’t get enough! I know that some people might shy away from reading any religious texts…I totally get that. But in my room, I have Christian, Muslim, and Hindu as well as a few babies who don’t practice any religion. I hear them talking about it alot and I try to bring in culturally diverse texts whenever I can! Plus they seriously LOVE it. I think it’s so important that we learn about each other and how to talk about differences with kindness and respect!
Okay…different gear…if you don’t have this book, you need to order it…like, yesterday! It is freaking HILARIOUS! So it starts out saying that whatever the book says you HAVE to read. Then it just makes you say absolutely ridiculous things. I’m surprised no one peed in their pants while I read it because they were laughing THAT hard. After I read it to my class, I ordered another copy for my sweet brother. I couldn’t bare to take the book from my class because they love it so much. But Liam HAD to have it!
This is SUCH a sweet book. Little Rosie LOVES to create things but sometimes her ideas don’t work and people laugh at her. At the end, her great-great Aunt helps her build a helicopter. It crashes the first time and she learns an important lesson…failure is just an important step in finally meeting your goal. It’s definitely a must-read. It rhymes too which is an added bonus!! 🙂
We also read this book! They loved it and it had such a beautiful lesson. Sally sees all of these horrible things happening like kids bullying each other, being disrespectful, throwing trash on the ground, and a few other things. Even though she’s so small, she decides to stand up and changes the whole culture of her school. So precious!
Each of these read-alouds was just a think-aloud. It didn’t serve a specific purpose in our day except to model fluent reading and comprehension strategies. When we are having these discussions, we havebeen working REALLY hard to use Talk Moves. My kiddos are getting good at this. We are working on having a conversation without me directing it. So far, about 5 kids have been able to respectfully wait for each other and continue the conversation when it’s their turn. They use this anchor chart ALOT!!
Finally, I just wanted to show a super simple Sight Word game. So I lay them all out on the table and call out a sight word. The kiddos race to grab the stick and keep them until the end. I actually like using the sticks more than cards because they don’t get ripped or folded while they’re grabbing them. At the end, they lay out their sticks and read them aloud to the group. It’s so simple but they’re loving it. Plus it’s SO easy to differentiate. I just put different group words in different colors so I know exactly what to pull! 🙂
