Happy New Year! It’s our first Schedulin Sunday of 2022. This week we’re continuing Word Family Bootcamp and really diving into blending and decoding CVC words! And now we’re adding some more emphasis to writing words because we’re doing well with blending! We actually do some blending and segmenting during ABC BOOTCAMP but now it will be our focus! I’m pumped to see them apply the knowledge from ABC BOOTCAMP! We are continuing our district-mandated requirements and our foundational skills curriculum. And this week, we’re celebrating the new year with our resolutions, learning about penguins with our Penguins Research Project, and animals with our Four Seasons Research Project.
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:
Word Family BOOTCAMP
After ABC BOOTCAMP, we start Word Family Bootcamp! This is when we take the sounds and letters we learned in ABC BOOTCAMP and begin applying those skills to reading and writing CVC WORDS! Word Family Bootcamp is done a bit differently because we do a word family every 2 days. Day 1 is the circle chart and day 2 is word building and word writing. So we do two-word families a week and Friday we practice blending and writing! I was so proud of my kids in the first week of Word Family Bootcamp! Their decoding/blending skills were great! The writing was good but we definitely have to keep working on those fine motor skills!
We have spent five weeks working on Word Family Bootcamp. Those five weeks focus on the word families for each vowel. Now, we will focus on blending, reading, and writing CVC words.
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 Year At Maple Hill Farm
We are continuing with unit 2 of our required curriculum which is all about the farm! This week we are using the text The Year At Maple Hill Farm! We are focusing on how animals change during the seasons and key details to describe the seasons!
This week we are doing:
- sentences and expanding sentences using a Who? DId what? When? chart
- clothing sort
- writing and drawing about animals in the four seasons
We are also using our Four Seasons Research Project as part of our study on seasons!
Here are the farm books we’re reading as part of this farm module: (CLICK THE IMAGE TO SEE THE BOOKS ON AMAZON!)
Happy New Year!
Monday we’re celebrating the new year with a New Year’s Party complete with a balloon drop and a toast!
We start off by learning about resolutions and writing our own resolutions using the book Squirrel’s New Year’s Resolution!
And we celebrate! A countdown, confetti, balloon drop, and a non-alcoholic sparkling Rose’ toast!
Our snack is a ball drop snack! We use a cupcake, coffee stirrer, and donut hole!
Penguins Research Project
The rest of the week will be all about penguins! I mean, who doesn’t love penguins?! Here’s some TKS trivia…our Penguin Research Project was our VERY FIRST research project! My class wanted to learn about penguins so I made this research project. The kids loved it and learned so much…and the rest is history!
As with all of our research projects, we start with a schema map. Students share their schema about penguins. We add our new learning as we progress through our research project!
This week we will make a can/have/are chart using read alouds for the research. And we will label the parts of a penguin. As we label, we discuss the adaptations penguins have and how they use each body part! Students will write their learning in their research journals!
We also make a penguin hat!
And yes, there is a costume!!!
Math
This week we are practicing subtraction using our district mandated math tasks. But we’re going to put our own spin on these! The focus of these tasks is using part-part whole to subtract and taking away and then writing the equations!
We are starting with Get Off My Boat and focusing on writing the equations!
The remaining tasks are subtracting balloons. For this task we will use real balloons. We will pop the balloons to subtract and students will write the equations on their white boards.
We will also make a giant part-part whole chart on the floor. We will subtract using this chart and students will write the equations.
Friday we will do subtracting candy. I will show the candy on the document camera. Studetns will write the equation on their paper and solve. This will be used for our assessment.
Mad Science
This week for Mad Science Thursday we are going to make snow slime!
Foodie Fun Friday
This week our Foodie Fun Friday snack is a penguin! (If you’re keeping count, this is a 2 snack week!)
Mini ice-cream sandwich, Oreos, orange jelly bean, candy orange slices and candy eyes!
These are the resources we are using in our classroom this week:
SIGHT WORD READER AND POEM FREEBIE!
For more information, check out these posts:
