Categories Classroom Management, Literacy, Math, S.T.E.A.M., Science, Social Studies, Weekly Lesson Plans

Schedulin Sunday: Families, Five Senses, And Counting Collections!

It’s Schedulin Sunday! This week we’re continuing to introduce centers (read to self, count the room, See Count Graph), focus on procedures and routines, pulling small groups and learning about families, learn how to do counting collections, and learn about our five senses. And it’s a short week for the kids because Friday is in-service for teachers!

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:

ABC BOOTCAMP

We continue our district-mandated foundational skills curriculum this week along with ABC BOOTCAMP! We complete district required curriculum and supplement it with ABC BOOTCAMP as part of our phonics and phonemic awareness lessons. ABC BOOTCAMP is aligned with the science of reading, is research-based, and uses best practices, including sounds first. With ABC BOOTCAMP you introduce the sound first and the letter is how you spell the sound. And it’s FUN AND HIGHLY EFFECTIVE! How effective? After 26 days, classrooms see an average of 80% mastery of sounds and letters!

Students are encouraged to bring in objects for each sound. We say the word (building vocabulary), identify the sound (phonemic awareness), spell the sound, and write the sound (phonics) and Mr. Greg draws the picture. If students don’t bring an object, we just brainstorm words for each sound. The objects help overcome language and vocabulary barriers. And yes, YOU MUST DRAW THE PICTURES! It’s a key part of ABC BOOTCAMP. The pictures connect the sound to known words/objects which is necessary for students to learn sounds!

Reading Comprehension-Five Senses Research Project

This week we are continuing our required reading curriculum by learning about the five senses. We supplement heavily with our Five Senses Research Project. We are required to do 3 lessons a week so that’s what we do. We focus on the “learn” section of each lesson and use our research project to scaffold and support student learning!

This week we will do an I Know/I can do chart to share what we’ve learned so far and what we can do with what we have learned. We also do our sensory jars lessons. These are great for identifying how we use our senses and bringing in some adjectives. For each sense, I show pictures and we decide if we can use our senses on that object. If we can, we add it to our jar and then we describe the smell, touch, taste, etc.

Also this week we will continue to draw/write about using our senses by recording in our research journals!

And finally this week, we will apply our learning to POPCORN! I use an air popper to pop some popcorn. The kids are MESMERIZED by the air popper! Then we describe the popcorn using all five senses. And yes, we EAT the popcorn!

Click the image to see our Five Senses read-alouds on Amazon!

Families Research Project

This week we also continue our Families Research Project. I think this is one of our most important research projects all year. It is so important for us to learn about families and how we all have different families. It’s so important that we learn that families are families no matter how they look and that we foster kindness and tolerance.

We started this last week in our class and the kids have been so engaged and excited to share about their families! It’s been amazing to see them connecting with each other and embracing all the different families in our classroom!

CLICK THE IMAGE TO SEE OUR BOOKS ON AMAZON!

This week we will read My Daddy Snores and Tango Makes Three. We will create a circle chart about how our families irritate us and we will make a graph about how many people are in our family.

We will also do two simple art projects this week. Handprints and fingerprints!

Math

We continue NUMBER BOOTCAMP this week!

As part of our Number Bootcamp, we learn to explicitly write the numbers!

This year our district is using Illustrative Math as our math curriculum. We will be completing those lessons and supplementing them heavily with our Math It Up! resources. The pacing has gotten very slow and we’re finally moving to some actual counting (although we’ve been working on this in our classroom already because I don’t believe in holding kids back!). This week we’re introducing counting collections. We used to do these weekly in our classroom and it was fantastic! This week we will focus heavily on procedures for counting collections. We will be differentiating our counting collections to 5, 10, and 20. On Wednesday, we will be working on recording our collection and sharing it with the class.

Counting collections are basically bags of objects to count. Use whatever you have in your room to make your collections. Target mini-erasers are perfect for counting collections!

Each child grabs a bag. They use a ten-frame or five-frame to count their objects. They can also record their collection using a recording sheet. Finally, they share their collection and how they counted it with the class.