This week is gonna be a wild ride, ya’ll! We’re celebrating Lunar New Year and Groundhog Day! And we’re comparing numbers and reading Little Red Hen! It’s gonna be a jam-packed week of fun and learning!

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 continuing 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. This week we’re starting with digraphs. We’re doing SH and CH this week! We will do two days per digraph so day 1 will be a circle chart and day 2 will be word writing and decodable texts in small groups!

And yes, Blends 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: Little Red Hen

We are continuing with unit 2 of our required curriculum which is all about the farm! This week we are using the text Little Red Hen! I love fairy tales so I’m so excited to read this story this week! This week we are working on character traits, story maps, and problem/solutions!

Here is an example of the story maps from Three Little Pigs:

Lunar New Year Research Project

On Tuesday we will celebrate Lunar New Year in our classroom! We will learn about the customs of the Lunar New Year and the Year Of The Tiger! We graph if we like rice and we will eat noodles using chopsticks!

Note: When we first started celebrating Lunar New Year in our classroom, we referred to it as Chinese New Year. As we learned more, we understood that this holiday is not just a Chinese holiday. We updated our resources to be more inclusive and accurate. When we know better, we do better.

We also make lanterns to decorate our classroom!

We use a 12×18 inch piece of paper. First, cut a strip off. This will be the handle. Next, fold the paper in half. Draw a line across the paper. Then draw the vertical lines. This will show students where to cut and where to stop cutting. After they make the cuts, fold the corners together and staple! Staple the handle on top and hang it from the ceiling!

Read It Up: Groundhog Gets A Say

It’s GROUNDHOG DAY! And that means we celebrate! We learn about groundhogs, we make predictions do a graphing game, make a snack and do an art project! Grab our ALL-INCLUSIVE Read It Up creation to make your Groundhog Day EASY!

The day before Groundhog Day, we predict if the groundhog will see his shadow!

We read Groundhog Gets A Say and make a chart of all the information we learn about groundhogs! (Ya’ll…they’re pretty fascinating animals!)

We flip a groundhog coin and graph the results!

We make a cute little groundhog project. This is process art so I model each of the steps. I do a step, the students do the step. And we get all the adorable groundhogs!

And we make a groundhog snack! This varies slightly depending on what we can find at the store. I prefer a brownie, but if I can’t find brownies I use a sugar cookie! We spread green icing on the cookie and add a “groundhog” (teddy graham)!

Math-Comparing Numbers

This week we’re starting with comparing numbers! We’re using our Math It Up: Comparing Numbers creation! Week 1 will be hands-on, concrete lessons. Week 2 is when we learn to use the symbols!

We will compare groups of objects (or students) to see which one is the most! (Similiar to this picture but without using the symbols!)

The next activity will be grab and count! Students will work in pairs and will use the handprint mats and buckets of objects. They will grab a handful of counters, place them on the paper and discuss which group is more or less.

Celebrating 2’s This Week? Let TKS Help!!

This week’s resources:

Morning Meeting Greeting

Our greeting this week is a groundhog greeting! We made this in PowerPoint! The kids “pop” out of the groundhog burrow and we say good morning to our groundhog friends! This video shows this greeting in action during virtual school last year! (It was also our 100th day of school…hence the Sophia Petrillo costume!)

FREE FILES!

For more information, check out these posts: