This week our theme was Fall! We learned about different leaves but also our main goal was to learn about the letter Aa! We did many fun activities to practice our writing of the letter Aa; from tracing it, to circling it in a poem that we read, the students know what an A looks like. As well we listened to a song from Jolly Phonics for the letter A. Like all the letters in this program the letter A correlates with a motion and sound. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Djz82FBYiug) The students stick out their left arm, getting their right arm ready to be the "a...a...a... ants crawling on their arm". I have done this with my students/classes in the past and the students really respond well to it. When we are done learning the letters this will help with phonemic awareness, as well as being able to recall letter sounds to blend letters together to make words. We will be creating a different animal/creature/thing for the letter of the week we are learning until we get through them. Then I will be combining them into books to be sent home when completed! This week for Aa we created Alligators - A is for Alligator.
As for our theme of fall we have painted with leaves and made abstract art paintings with them. We have created "stain-glass" paper leaves that we are hanging in our windows to brighten up our room. We have worked on our numbers by cutting out leaves and matching them with the number on the tree and coloring it with fall colors. We also created some fall portraits with fall leaf sentences. The students chose a fall color (brown, red, orange or yellow) and had to color their leaf and the crayon that matched the color word. Then had to cut the sentence strip out and place their leaf/color word crayon in the correct spot. (ex. This leaf (insert leaf) is yellow (insert color word crayon)) Then they were to create a fall time picture to go with the sentence.
As for our theme of fall we have painted with leaves and made abstract art paintings with them. We have created "stain-glass" paper leaves that we are hanging in our windows to brighten up our room. We have worked on our numbers by cutting out leaves and matching them with the number on the tree and coloring it with fall colors. We also created some fall portraits with fall leaf sentences. The students chose a fall color (brown, red, orange or yellow) and had to color their leaf and the crayon that matched the color word. Then had to cut the sentence strip out and place their leaf/color word crayon in the correct spot. (ex. This leaf (insert leaf) is yellow (insert color word crayon)) Then they were to create a fall time picture to go with the sentence.
READING IS KEy....
And most of all, we have been learning through doing which is huge in our classroom. By doing different things we learn about the world around us but as well we learn about things we need to know to grow. We have been spending a lot more time in our reading corner which I love to see because literacy is the bridge to imagination and a world of possibilities. I made the reading corner as comfortable a place I could without it becoming too comfortable so that the students would want to and love to read. At this age as well having those "reading buddies" of stuffed animals really helps them. This allows for them to work on their book handling skills but also being confident in reading books from a young age.