Categories Classroom Management, Literacy, Math, Weekly Lesson Plans

Schedulin Sunday: Blends Bootcamp And Counting Collections

This week is a 4-day week for us. And probably a 3-day week because we’re supposed to get snow and here in the south, that means a snow day is likely on Tuesday! This week we’re starting Blends Bootcamp and really diving into blending and decoding words! And now we’re adding some more emphasis to writing words because we’re doing well with blending! We are continuing our district-mandated requirements and our foundational skills curriculum. And this week, we’re learning about penguins with our Penguins Research Project and learning about MLK!

Note: This year, my goal is to show you that you can use our TKS resources along with required curriculums and continue to have fun, so you’ll see that happening throughout the school year!

District Guidelines

We are required to wear masks indoors but not at recess.
We can have shared supplies and centers while maintaining 3 feet of distance when possible.
We are keeping our enhanced cleaning procedures (wipe down surfaces throughout the day, steam sanitize the room daily, hand sanitizer/hand washing throughout the day, steam mop the floors daily, etc)
I have added an air purifier to our classroom after reading the research from Johns Hopkins that these can help reduce the spread of Covid and other germs. CLICK HERE TO SEE THE PURIFIER I ORDERED!

Lesson Plans

As always, you can download our weekly lesson plans by clicking on the image!

You can get our EDITABLE lesson plan template by clicking on the image below:

Blends BOOTCAMP

In keeping with the pacing of our foundational skills curriculum, we’re starting Blends Bootcamp this week. Our mandated foundational skills curriculum adds blends to the decoding work we do, so we’re going to use Blends Bootcamp to support that work. We’re going to do 1 circle chart a day and use decodable texts in small groups. We will also be working on segmenting and writing words with blends.

And yes, Word Family Bootcamp and the entire TKS BOOTCAMP curriculum are aligned to the science of reading. And it has been from day 1 because that’s how I was taught to teach reading so it’s what I’ve always done!

Sight Word 60!

This week we are continuing Sight Word 60! After spending the summer learning more about the science of reading, we are continuing with Sight Word 60. We have always had decoding and encoding (writing) of the words as part of Sight Word 60 so we will continue that and will increase the amount of decoding and writing. We will also use orthographic mapping and we’re changing our order of sight words to align to the 109 most frequent words (even though we do 100 words…). You can learn all the details of how Sight Word 60 works on the linked blog post and you can get everything you need for Sight Word 60 in our Sight Word 60 creation!

Read It Up: The Three Little Pigs

We are continuing with unit 2 of our required curriculum which is all about the farm! This week we are using the text The Three Little Pigs! I love fairy tales so I’m so excited to read this story this week! We will be working on retelling a story with a story map and character traits! We will also use our critical thinking skills to determine which structure and building material was a good choice!

Martin Luther King, Jr

On Tuesday we will learn about MLK. We will read Martin’s Big Words and talk about how MLK wanted change. We will go beyond that and discuss how we made change happen. We will discuss our dreams for change and what we can do make change happen!

Penguins Research Project

We will be continuing our Penguins Research Project!

We will revisit our schema map and address our new learning from the last week!

This week we will bring in higher-order thinking skills with a true-false sort. For each false statement, students have to explain why it’s false and provide the true facts. This really helps them build thinking skills and language development! After the sort, students use the true facts to write about penguins.

For our penguin art project, we will be painting a symmetrical penguin!

Math-Counting Collections

This week our mandated math scope and sequence calls for us to work on counting to 20. We are going to modify the tasks a bit and make them into counting collections. This will be our first time using counting collections this year so we will learn how collections work and each day we will complete different counting collections. Students will choose a collection, count how many, write the number, circle the number, and draw the correct number of pictures. They will then share their thinking with the class.