Recap of last week and Peek at my week 3!

The following pictures and details are from my week two plans!  Week one was only 2 days 🙂  You can click to view those below!

Up first… Daily 5!  This week we tackled our first week of Daily 5 by building our reading stamina!   We made our I-chart and practiced, modeled, talked, and repeated that each and every day!  I don’t mind the modeling part at all….it’s actually really fun ha!  I run over to get by book tub, knock a few on the floors, sit down and get up several times, read really loud, and shout, “DONE!”  The kids think it is beyond hilarious.  I like to remind them that even though that seems so silly I’ve seen kids do each of those things so we have to make sure we doing the right thing!  Each day we up-ed our stamina by 1-2 minutes!

To keep the kiddos engaged I started with 2 books in their tubs and rotated them each night before I left.  I then added a third book towards the end of the week to help conquer the “I’m done.”  Next week we will continue with read to self and add in work on writing…2 rounds of Daily 5!  Woohooo!
Here are some snapshots of us reading to self….

Our intervention block, Tiger Time, is where the kiddos switch classrooms to get the instruction to fit the level they are currently on. These groups are fluid and change quite a bit throughout the year!  We will start the switching of students in a few weeks…until then we work on not only literacy skills, but classroom necessities like scissors practice!
I’m sure you’ve noticed in your own classroom that scissor usage seems to be one of those you either got it or not skills!  I wanted to help support those that struggle with this skill be getting the class down on the floor on our first day with scissors.  Students are able to cut easier when their elbows are down.  For this introduction lesson we did a fringed “place mat.”  The students made small cuts around the paper.

We also worked on our coloring skills…

All of my beginning of the year skill {coloring, gluing, cutting} practice sheets can be found in this packet…

Before starting KinderPhonics we wanted to spend a week building upon the foundation of letter structure….strokes!  We get the kids up and moving and doing more then just paper/pencil practice!

Here we are on the first day practicing straight lines…I placed large butcher paper across my whiteboards.  The kids got to choose a marker and have their space to practice lines.

And the aftermath….

Up next is our close read for the week!!!!  I stumbled upon Little Smudge before I started teaching and knew it would be a staple in my classroom every year!  Little Smudge is a great story to teach students what it feels like when you are different from others, but when you realize you have something amazing to offer them!  The kids are always stunned to hear the not so nice words the characters are shouting, but they are always very happy to see the happy ending!  I also pulled out a couple of oldies but goodies…A Children’s Book About Teasing and We are the Same We are Different!

Okay how about some math tubs?!  So, I was a little ummm scared to introduce full rotations of math tubs this week…but like always the kids prove me WRONG and do great!  I wanted to make sure to provide fun, engaging, and meaningful for my centers!  I do have paper/pencil tasks for most of these math tubs but I have removed those for now so we can focus on the hands-on part!  I have 2 kids per tub and there is one complete “fun” exploration tub in the rotation which is teddy bears…a favorite of course!

This first week my focus was circulating the rooms making sure the students knew how to play the activity correctly and taking on some informal assessments.  I asked students to count out a certain number or to tell me how something was the same/different.  You’ll notice almost all of these activities require some degree of fine motor development…clothes pins are a must! 😉

Use clothes pin to place the correct number of apples in the tree…

Having a little fun with cars while practicing number maths of movement…

Play dough shape fun! Find this freebie here!

These number sense sorts are from Oriental Trading!  They are a lot of fun too!

And lastly a few more pictures from our week!  We worked on Deanna Jump’s Chicka Boom trees!

And a couple of shots from calendar math!  Pattern of the month and our counting tape!

Click below to download my plans for next week with “clickable” links!