Let's Hear It For Games!

Thanks to all of you, this month's sharing theme of games- the non electronic type, has been a huge hit!  The children have done an outstanding job of presenting their game, explaining the rules and then making it available to play with their friends at Explore time. I'm very impressed with this crew's turn taking abilities and their willingness to include others.  From the very beginning of the month we established that if a game had had four players and a fifth child wanted to join you could say, "sure, you can be on my team" or "this round is full but you can watch".  And this group really does it!  We've learned some cool new (to me) games and relearned some old stand by's.  Here's a look at in in action including a look at Friday's math game- Grab Bag 10.  In this game students take turns taking a handful of cubes out of a bag and spilling them on a 10 frame.  They then arrange them pair wise to see if every cube has a pair (it's an even number) or if there is an odd-cube-out (it's an odd number.  Last, they record the number on a white board noting if its odd or even.  The big aha...even numbers are doubles!

Finding New Strategies and Patterns

As you know Gerald and Piggie have been making the children laugh and motivating them to put their new found decoding strategies to the test.  We've been talking about: getting our lips ready to make the first sound of the word, stretching out the word to articulate all the sounds, skipping a hard word to see if you can figure it out from the words around it and checking to see if you what you read makes sense.  Lucky for us, Mo Willem's humor makes all of this a ton of fun!

 

In Math we've been working on seeing patterns as a strategy to predict what comes next in a series of numbers.  Using bikes and wheels as our example we teased out the concept of doubling (1 bike, two wheels- 2 bikes, 4 wheels etc.) and then made some observations about how counting by 2's could be a way to predict what would come next in our growing pattern. A careful look at the sticky notes and the white chart on the right will let you see the children's thinking about doubling and counting by 2's.

Happy New Year!

We had a lot of fun this week simply being back together!  Here is a look at the watercolor art that accompanied our January calendars.

As you may have read in the newsletter, Gerald and Piggie (the main characters in Mo Willem's brilliant beginning reader series) were an especially important part of our learning.  As we read more and more of their adventures, the children will be recording their favorite Gerald and Piggie quotes to create a new display in the hallway outside out classroom. These books are incredibly powerful in motivating young readers to tackle new words.

Here is a look at a number bond (also mentioned in the newsletter).

The children are enjoying this new way of representing addition equations.  Number bonds have become a regular component in our daily Number Corner routine.