This week is a do-over for last week because we had Monday off, Tuesday was a 2-hour delay and Thursday was a snow day so we didn’t anything done last week! This week we’re continuing Blends Bootcamp and really diving into blending and decoding words! We are continuing our district-mandated Wit And Wisdom requirements, and our foundational skills curriculum. And this week, we’re finishing our Penguins Research Project and writing about the characters in Three Little Pigs.

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. 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. Last week was our first week with Blends Bootcamp and the kids did GREAT! We worked on hearing the two sounds and decoding the words using the blend. We approach blends both ways because our benchmark assessments expect them to read the individual sounds so we work on that skill as well as using the blend to read and write.

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 Module 2 of Wit And Wisdom 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! This week we are working on character traits and collecting text evidence to support character traits!

Last week we did story elements with a story map. Here is one of the story maps my student made:

Penguins Research Project

We will be wrapping up our Penguins Research Project this week!

We will revisit our schema map to add new learning and address misconceptions.

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-Number Paths

This week our mandated math scope and sequence calls for us to work on counting to 20. We have a few students who still need some intense practice with counting to 20 so we’re going to work with them in small groups while the other students work in math centers. The differentiated centers let the students practice the skills they need while I can support my students in small groups.

For our small group work, we’re going to use number paths. These are like number lines but they have boxes for the numbers. The boxes help the students understand that the number is a quantity and helps them with their one-to-one correspondence. I have used number paths with a couple of students and saw a noticeable difference.

Our number paths are included in our Small Group Math Toolkit!

On Friday, we will do our weekly counting collection! We did our first one last week and the kids loved it! They especially loved sharing about their collections.

Click on the image to get your FREE counting collection recording sheet!

Mad Science

This week for Mad Science Thursday we are going to make our own bouncy balls!

Foodie Fun Friday

This week our Foodie Fun Friday snack is a polar bear snack!

Vanilla ice cream cup, vanilla wafers and chocolate chips!

These are the resources we are using in our classroom this week:

FREE FILES!

For more information, check out these posts: