Environmental Print and Broccoli From the Garden

Environmental Print are the symbols, signs, numbers and colors that we see in our everyday world around us.  This is a great way to teach our students how to picture read and that even if we can't read all the words, we can still read the pictures.  It was fun seeing and listening to how excited the students were when they realized they could read all the street sign pictures from one of our books.

We then played this Environmental Print Game, "I have _________. Who has ____________.  We focused on using complete sentences to share and ask for specific signs.

Here are some photos of the students playing this game!

As you probably saw, in your child's book bag there was a paper asking for 10 labels of environmental print from around your home.  These will be used to make an environmental print word wall!  Please send them to our classroom cut out by Wednesday.  Thanks!

BROCCOLI FROM THE GARDEN!

Last year my students wanted to grow vegetables.  Since the beginning of this school year the students have been observing the broccoli and have been wanting to eat some.  We decided to harvest it this week.  We had noticed some caterpillars outside earlier in the week and so we needed to look really carefully when we were washing it.  Sure enough with the students good eyes we found some cabbage caterpillars.  These caterpillars turn into beautiful white butterflies once they turn.  

HARVESTING THE BROCCOLI

Before washing the broccoli really good this is what we found.  It's kind of hard to spot because they are almost the exact shade of green. 

The students are looking forward to watching more peppers turn red and orange in our garden.  They have even given me ideas to what we should plant in the spring!

Thanks for stopping by!

Mrs. Atkin

Work Stations-2 and Classroom Number Resource

This week we added a few new work stations.  In Exploration Work stations we added "Domino Parking Lot", Counting with one-to-one correspondence, and "Race Track Numbers" and "Shape Race".  

Domino Parking Lot is a fun game for the students.  Most games are fun for students when they get to pretend their driving cars.  They have a mat with numbers which is the "parking space" and as they pull a domino "car" out of the bag, their job is to count the dots on the domino "car" and match it with the corresponding number "parking space". 

This next game allows students to count the corresponding cubes for the number at the top of their mat.  For example, Anthony counted six cubes to match the 6 mat he choose.  This is a great activity to work on counting with one-to-one correspondence. 

Race Track Numbers-  Students used cars to trace the numbers 3 times and then practice writing the number three times.  

Shape Race-  Students have a game board.  Each student pulls out a shape card, must recognize the shape and count it's sides.  They then must share "I have a square and it has 4 sides", or "I have a triangle and it has 3 sides".  The students then move the amount of spaces that corresponds to the number of sides the shape had. 

LITERACY WORK STATIONS

This week we added one more literacy Work Station, "Names".  This work station is a great way for the students to begin recognizing their classmates names, looking at alphabetizing names, sorting, and much, much more.  This week the students focused on matching the students name to their picture.  They worked really hard and matched everyone's name and picture!

NUMBER RESOURCES

The last couple weeks we have been working on creating our classroom number resource to put on the wall.  I like for things to be "Kid Made" rather than buy them from the store.  The students are able to invest more interest and ownership into the our classroom when they have created the classroom resources.  Below you will see how Stephanie helped me create the number four number resource.

We first write it on the board for a practice round.  The students are using their fingers to write in the air, pretend to write on the floor, arm, friends back etc...  

Then Stephanie write the number 4 on the card. 

Together we listened and made the first letter sound of the word "four".  We then documented how to write the word "four" on our resource sheet. 

We then added the appropriate number of stickers to match the number 4.  

In the upper right hand corner you might be able to see that we also documented 4 with tally marks as well.  You can see Stephanie is proud of her work!

Shades of color

In our classroom it is very important for our students to know that they are all special.  In order to build classroom community our students must know they are all important, special, and a valued member of our community.  We value friendships in our classroom and no matter how different we are from each other we value being different and unique!  As we continue in our color investigations this week we started exploring shades of color.  A great way for us to explore color shades, we took it upon ourselves to find our skin color.  It's an amazing lesson for the children to know that what makes us different is what makes us special!  Take a look at us trying to find our skin shade. It took a long time to find our shade but we all enjoyed mixing, and investigating color. 

Every student got three colors, black, white, and brown.  

It was their job to mix the paints to try to find their appropriate color. 

 

Each time they created a new shade they painted a vertical line on a paper to 

document that specific shade of color. 

 

 After painting this line they checked to see how close the line was to their skin shade.  Some students realized really fast that they didn't need too much of one or the other color to find their skin shade. 

 When students found their shade we pained their hands and made a hand print.

I know the photo is blurry but the label says "Finding our shade of color!"

This is what our bulletin board looks like outside our classroom. I hope you have had a great weekend.  Have a wonderful week.  Take care!

Mrs. Atkin