This week students learned about the letters “u” and “i”. We practiced writing and identifying the sounds. The class also started to understand the difference between consonants and vowels. We talked about how vowels give words voice. We also spent a lot of time reviewing the sounds we already learned. This knowledge will be beneficial for improving student writing as we encourage them to sound out their words. The students have been doing a great job with their letter sounds and writing.
We continued our tree unit this week. Students took a digital tour of trees around the world. We observed trees in swamps, mountains, valleys, orchards and other different places. Students were amazed to see how different trees can look depending on the environment that surrounds them. Students then drew their own trees and practiced labeling the parts: roots, branches, leaves and trunk. To practice learning these new vocabulary words, we played memory using picture and word cards and also played a matching game as a class.
This week we did a whole class “Math Talk”. During this activity, the class makes observations of a picture with different images or things. For example, today’s picture was at a frog pond. The image showed frogs in a pond, trees, spiders, cattails, etc. The students first recognized what was in the picture. Then we counted all the frogs, spiders, cattails, and other objects the students noticed. From there, we told number stories using the images we circled like: There are four frogs in the pond and two frogs on a rock. How many frogs are there in all? Students would share their answer and we would discuss how they solved for it. This is a great activity for getting students to talk about math and explain their thinking. We will continue to do this activity with more complicated pictures that have different combinations of numbers to encourage math discussions.
I am looking forward to meeting with many of you this coming Wednesday. If you need to cancel or change your conference time, please do so on the sign up website or email me directly if you need to change it that day. Thank you!
Enjoy the long weekend!