Thursday, December 16, 2010
I don't know about you guys, but I'm continually trying to find ways to get everything worked in during a day, much less a week! So I created a little word wall weekly activity sheet which sits in the table bucket for the kids to work on as they have extra minutes here and there. I also included a couple of word wall games that the kids really love, but that I sometimes forget to do in the middle of everything else going on.
Word Search: I use http://www.puzzle-maker.com/cgi-bin/wswo.cgi to create the word search at the top of page one.
Mind Reader Game: The teacher thinks of a word from the word wall words from the week. (Mine are in the "parking lot.") The teacher give three clues. The first clue is always "The word I'm thinking of is in the parking lot." The students write guess 1. Then the teacher gives a second clue (number of letters, beginning sound, etc.) and the students may keep the guess the same or change their guess and record on guess 2. The third clue should make the word obvious.
Wordo Game: Students write words from the parking lot in the spaces first, then adds any words from the word wall in the remaining blanks. I keep the words on index cards and draw them out. Students who get Wordo (like Bingo) get a sticker. Easy and fun.
Here's a really great Christmas ornament that my good friend Beth Randall shared with me before she left the classroom. It's puzzle pieces spray painted green on a poster board circle. The ribbon is hot glued on the back. The berries are red puff paint. The kids really love making these fun wreaths for their parents.
Thursday, December 2, 2010
As part of our calendar time for December, we made Christmas Countdown Chains (an oldie but a goodie!) The kids took theirs home to hang on their closet doors, but we have one at school hanging by our calendar and will take one loop off each day until break.
To help us learn our doubles facts, we are building a tree map of sorts. As you can see by all the space at the bottom, our chart is a work in progress but eventually will include pictures of dominoes for each double fact, the matching subtraction fact and any other pictures and words we can think of. The pictures were taken from http://www.pflugervilleisd.net/curriculum/math/documents/SeeingDoubles_1st.pdf.
For a little added fun to practice skip counting, we read Hands Down by Michael Dahl and labeled the reindeer antlers in a skip counting by 5's pattern, 0 - 95. I always begin with zero to give the kids a frame of reference for the beginning of every skip counting pattern.