Schedulin’ Sunday: “If You Give A Moose A Muffin” and “Hands Can

Monday:  We are going to start learning our letters and sounds this week.  We use the Treasure’s reading series.  And by use I mean I use it as a space occupier in my storage area.  We do use the schedule for when we introduce letters, so we start with M.  We will read If you Give A Moose A Muffin and discuss the story.  We will celebrate the letter M by making a sentence strip hat for M that we can wear all week.  We will practice writing Mm on our chalkboard and do a cut and paste activity to sort letters that are M and letters that are not M.    In math, we are going to keep focusing on numbers and counting.  We are going to make our own “touch math” posters using beans.  Each student will receive a set of posters from 1-5.  The students will glue the correct number of beans onto each poster!  This will help with number recognition, number writing and counting!  And it’s fun!

Click here to see the sentence strip hats!

Tuesday:  We will read If You Give A Moose A Muffin and create a flow map (thinking maps!) to sequence the story.  We will spend a lot of time talking about how books and stories happen in order and how we use that order to help us understand what we read.  We will also do our very first picture sort.  We will cut out pictures that start with the mmmmm sound and glue them on our monkey.  And for fun, we’re going to make a moose craftivity!  In math we are going to use our moose inspiration to practice counting!  We are going to use the Moose A Muffin counting mats and muffin counters I just created to learn our numbers and practice counting.  You can even have this fun activity by clicking on the picture and downloading for free!  We also start to introduce science this week and we start by talking about things we can do with our hands.  We start off by brainstorming (we discuss brainstorming and how we do it and why we do it)  a list of things we do with our hands.  After we make our list, we make a print of our hand.  These are displayed and saved at the end of the year, we do it again to see how much we have grown!  Parents love these too!

Wednesday:  We read the big book Hands Can and discuss the story.  We compare our list of things hands can do that we made Tuesday to the things hands did in the story.  We do independent handwriting practice for the letter M after Mr. Greg does explicit instruction on how to write the letter. I plan to use our SmartBoard to model how to write the letter.  We will also do a sort about marshmallow toes.  I use marshmallow toes as a reminder for my little monsters to keep their feet quiet in the hallway, ESPECIALLY THE STAIRS!!!!  I found a great marshmallow toe activity on Donna Conway’s TPT store!  We will read the book and sort loud and quiet objects. And of course, we have to do a craftivity so we’ll make the marshmallow toes craftivity from the packet and display them in the stairs to remind us to have quiet marshmallow toes!  In math we will do our flippin’ numbers game for a few minutes.  We use our magic math fingers to point to numbers when the random number CD calls out numbers.  I use this as a formative assessment each week because I can quickly see how is learning their numbers and who isn’t!  And for fun we will do the gummy bear counting activity from last week!  Click here for details and a freebie!

Thursday:  We will read Hands Can and the students will echo read the story.  After discussing the story, we will write complete a predictable chart.  Our predictable chart is  My hands can….  We will also do our first picture sort that I use as an assessment.  I use the picture cards from our reading series to create the sort.  Each child will get a sheet of 12 pictures.  6 will be for the MMM sound and 6 will be the SSS sound.  They will fold their construction paper and cut out the pictures and glue them on the M and S sides.  In math we are going to do an activity where the students will have to match numbers to pictures of dots.  Each child will have 10 index cards (my teammates came up with the index card idea!  I told you they are beyond amazing!) and will glue a number and the correct dot picture to a card.  They will keep these in their Math Tools bag to use later!  This will also be another formative assessment piece that I will use as evidence for my stellar evaluations!  And to end our Thundering Thursday we will make an Olympian craftivity to keep working on building our sense of community and reminding ourselves to do the very best we can everyday!

Friday:   Food Friday!  Today we will make muffins to eat for our snack!  We have a toaster oven in our classroom (thank you, Donors Choose!) so we can whip up some delicious muffins to give the moose!  We will do a fun predictable chart with the sentence  ” _________ will gave a moose a _____.”  I can’t wait to see what we feed the moose!

Fridays are also the day we add our sight words of the week to the word wall.  I blast some great fanfare music as we read the words and attach them to the wall!  This week we have only one word:  I.  We will also play I Have Who Has during morning meeting!  During morning meeting we will learn a new way of greeting our friends.  I place a stack of cards with each child’s picture and name programmed on a card.  A child will draw a card and walk to that child and greet them.  This is a fun way to greet one another as we learn to read each other’s name!

So there ya have it folks!  A glimpse into our moose-tastic week of sparkly, glittery learning!  Will you use any of my ideas?  Do you have ideas to add?  I would love to hear from you all!