It’s a holiday weekend…it’s stormy and rainy…and here I am planning for a short week! Did you plan today?
I have to share my pet peeve of the day. I am not easily annoyed or irritated. The fiancee’ says I am the most laid back person and nothing ever gets me riled up. If I get mad or if I am in a bad mood, then something is really wrong. This morning at church the man sitting behind us was a loud nose breather. People, he might as well have been scratching his nails down a chalkboard. For real. An hour of him nose breathing was almost more than I can handle. Why are there loud nose breathers in our world? I don’t get it. Open your mouth a little. OK, rant over. On to what you’re all looking for…my amazingly, glittery, world changing plans for the week.
It’s time for my regular Sunday feature, Schedulin’ Sunday!
This week we are focusing on the letter S and the sound of S! I am also incorporating community helpers into my plans this week. Last year when we talked about what we wanted to be when we grew up, the kids had no idea. A couple said they wanted to work at Wal Mart and Burger King. Not that there is anything wrong with that at all. However, I was very disturbed by the fact that they didn’t know what they could be. So this week and throughout the year, we will focus on what we want to be and the jobs in our community.
Tuesday
We are going to kickoff our celebration of the letter S by reading and discussing Eric Carle’s book, Mister Seahorse. After reading the story we will do a seahorse picture sort. The students will cut out pictures that begin with the S sound and glue them on their seahorse. You can get the sort for free by clicking on the picture! We will also make our S hat to wear for the week! This week’s hat is space! The kids will love making a space hat! Who doens’t love space?! And i’m sure that if you are my Facebook friend, you will get to see a picture of me wearing said hat. Don’t lie, you know you look forward to Mr. Greg wearing letter hats. For today’s craftivity we will make a tissue paper seahorse! The students will use a glue and water mixture to glue tissue paper squares onto a seahorse outline. I love this project! It’s so amazing to see the color combinations the kids choose! After we are finished, I make a displaying the hallway using blue paper that looks like water! To finish our reading block, we will make a circle map of jobs we will want to do. I plan to add to this circle map as we learn more about jobs and community helpers. In math, we are going to focus on 1 to 1 correspondence. I am introducing this concept officially this week. I am using an idea I found on Pinterest (surprise, I know!?) I will show a number card on my ELMO and we will put cubes on our fingers to strengthen our one to one counting skills.
Wednesday
We will re-read Mr. Seahorse and complete our story map. (I will try to remember to snap a picture of our story map chart this week!) We will do a picture sort of words that say SSSS and words that do not. The students will then complete a picture sort on their own. I use this as a formative assessment to see how we’re doing with the SSSS sound. We will take our ideas from our circle map and complete a predictable chart with the sentence: When I Grow Up I want to be a. In mat we will use our one to one counting skills to build unifix cube towers. We will use the Smart Board spinner to spin a number and the students will build a tower with the correct number of cubes. And of course, Mr. Greg’s Little Monsters cannot have a day without a craftivity! We will be working on community helper craftivities from Mrs. Lee’s Kinder Kids! I plan to give each child the community helper that they chose to be their career. If they choose something different from the patterns we have, then I will let them pick which craftivity they want to do. Wednesday is also the day our reading buddy, Bear The Dog visits. This is the first week the kids will get to read a book to Bear! I am excited for them to start their journey of reading discovery with Bear!
Thursday
We will read the book Firehouse by Mark Teague as we continue our study of community helpers. After discussing the book we will make two bubble maps. One will be about teachers and one will be about firefighters. After we finish we will discuss things that are the same and different. This is how I slowly start to introduce a double bubble map (Venn diagram) to my students. The students will complete another picture sort the SSS and MMM sounds. This is another assessment of the SSS sound as well as a review of the MMM sound. Can you tell how much I LOVE picture sorts? I credit our love of picture sorts with helping boost our DIBELS scores and helping us become great readers. In math we will read Ten Apples On Top and review our one to one counting skill. Each child will get to pick a number card and will count the correct number of apples. They will glue the apples on top of their picture and number each apple. They will also complete the sentence: ____ has ___ apples on top! We will also work on our community helper craftivities!
Friday
We will read the book Goodnight Goodnight Construction Site and talk about community helpers! We will review our letter and sound of the week. I will say a word and the class has to tell me the first sound. I will use S, M and A words. After we practice whole group, I give individual students a turn! For our letter S finale, we will use sequins to make an uppercase and lowercase S! In math, we are going to make a counting book to assess our 1 to 1 counting skills. The book has a page for each number. The students color the correct number of boxes and puts the correct number of stickers on the page. And for our Friday Foodie snack, we’re going to make a stop light to go with our community helpers theme! Yet another Pinterest find!!
This week we are introducing the sight words I and A. To help us with the words, I created an emergent reader! Click on the picture to get your copy!
I also created roll and color games and word cards for our community helper theme! Click on the picture to get your freebies!
What ideas will you try? Did any of our activities inspire you? Do you have suggestions for how to make our week better?