measuring up!

Today we worked on measuring the height of objects.  First, I had to make sure they knew what the word "height" meant.  After making sure they knew that height is how TALL something is, then we set out in the classroom to do some measuring.  Each student had a small booklet with 4 numbers in it.  So, if on their first page the number was 4, they had to find something in the classroom about 4 blocks tall.  Here are some pictures of the class hard at work:

100th Day of School

The 100th day of school was Thursday, Jan. 26.  This is always a fun day of school for us all!  We started the day with the kids walking into the classroom with "Celebration" playing!  I found out we have some top notch dancers in our class!!!  :)

We had a busy day that day with several different "100 centered" activities.  Some included; building a structure with 100 cups, using 1-0-0 to create a picture, writing 100 words we see around the room, and our Fruit Loop necklaces, of course!  

class="nopin"

class="nopin"

class="nopin"

Here are some other pictures of what we are working on in the classroom.

We are working hard on syllables.  Here I made these picture cards, and we put balls of Play-Doh inside each circle.  They smoosh the playdoh with each syllable.  

class="nopin"

This chart is from Deanna Jump.

class="nopin"

A New Year

We are starting a brand new year off,  and kicked it off with our 2017 goals.  We made these party hats and wrote 3 of our goals for this year.  

In Math, we are thoroughly enjoying our Math binders, with our PB&J partners.  They work on several skills in these binders, using a very hands on approach.  

talking about more/less/equal to

We also have been using our monthly cards to help us with popular words we may be writing about that particular month.  

If you are an educator, or home school parent, these cards are free in my TPT store.  Click here to find them.  

We have started working on digraphs, and the /ch/ sound is our first one.  

Here are some of our winter art projects we have been working on:

I just love the phonetic spelling!  

We did the following art project by first reading "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs", and then choosing each student's favorite food/drink.

Can somebody tell me how we are already to the end of October?!?  Seriously, the school year is flying by.  Next week, we will reach our 50th day of school already--CRAZY!  

This time of year always makes my little teacher heart happy, and I'll tell you why...It's always the time where the kids begin to put their knowledge of letter sounds together to start reading and writing phonetically.  They start off a little unsure of this ability, but it doesn't take long for them to see they have all the pieces they need to perform these skills.  

We like to reinforce letter identification and beginning letter sounds in our morning centers this time of year.  Here are some of our centers from a few weeks ago:

In this center, they used the clothespins with a letter on it, and clipped it to the card that started with that letter.  

Alphabet Soup is a great game for letter recognition.  They scoop out a ping pong ball with a letter written on it, then find and color the corresponding letter on that sheet.  

This was a fun, reinforcing center on beginning sounds.  They each had cards, and had to put the magnetic letter below the picture.  

We started working on word families, and the _at family is the first one we learn.  We used these as letter vests and "squish" together to form different words.  

In our math binders, we were spinning and tallying the numbers.  They work with partners for their math binder work--and always have a great time!

Ten frames, ten frames and more ten frames!!  

One of their favorite things to do is to work in our Interactive Language Arts Notebook.  

We worked on our sight words here, but we also use it to write, recognize, and practice sounds for each of the letters of the alphabet.  

The kids are using their "attenti-scopes" that Mrs. Row teaches them in our Second Step program.  

Bats, spiders, Halloween have been our theme study for the month of October.  Here are some pictures of things we have been up to:

Here are some examples of that wonderful phonetic spelling I was telling you about. We read the book Crankenstein--a story about a cranky little boy who's grouchy mood changes him into Crankenstein.   I especially empathize with this little sweetie's answer:

I see more and more writing like this in their journals, on their papers, etc.  And it is so exciting to see.  

We got more/new alternative seating that we will rotate throughout the classroom.  I am so excited about this, as I mentioned in an earlier post the benefits of alternative seating in education.  Here is us on day 1.