This week we are studying the time that Jesus went to visit Mary and Martha. Mary listened to Jesus, but Martha was too busy. Often we think we are too busy as well to take time to study God's Word or to worship Him. God blesses us through His Word and also grants us peace and comfort in His saving promises. May we all stop and take time from our busy lives to be with the Lord.
Our mini lessons before literacy centers this week are focusing on nouns and verbs. We watched some video songs today to help us learn that nouns are words that name people, places, or things. Then we sorted words by people, places, and things. At the word work table the students are using spinners to put onsets and rimes together to make words. They blend the onsets and rimes together to determine if the word that they made is real or nonsense. At the phonemic awareness table the students are sorting words by the number of syllables. The alphabet table has a long a snake game where students place a marker on their snakes if a word contains long a. Then they sort long a and short a words in a book. Students are having fun making a fox to attach to a book that helps them to retell Rosie' Walk. Finally students at the writing center are choosing a topic to research. They can choose a person, place, or thing to research and then they write some important facts that they learned. Our thematic centers this week focus on kites. Students get to make a paper kite that we hope to fly sometime soon. They also are making some beautiful kite pictures where they divide kite shapes into parts and decorate each part with different designs. They had fun painting the background and lifting off parts of the paint to make the clouds. At another center the students are making a little book that practices the important sight words "were" and "would". The book helps them to imagine what they would do if they were a kite. We are building double digit numbers using sets of 10 and so many extra ones. The kids spin for the tens and then spin for the ones. Then after they build (model) the number the students print the number. Today we listened to a story called What's For Lunch? That story retold the miracle of Jesus feeding the 5000. We are amazed that from five loaves of bread and two little fish there were leftovers. Then they collected the food and did not waste the leftovers. How often do we waste food or the blessings that God has given us? I often think about how there are times I buy too much and I should instead share with those in need. Thanks so much to everyone that has been donating to our food pantry. We have a school goal of donating 500 items. We have not met our school goal yet, but if every child would bring in 1-2 more items we would. The donations may be brought in until next Wednesday. We continued our literacy centers and many were excited for our new March writing center items to come. I just love reading their creative stories! Students continue to work on drawing and painting dinosaurs. These will go up in t;he hallway next week. We worked a bit on print concepts with a fun DVD. Some of the things we worked on were sentences, stories, plot, etc. We also continue to work on learning the definition of author and illustrator. We are learning their roles as well. In our calendar books we began the new month of March. As the temperature started dropping today, we also noted that March was coming in like a lion.....especially with the wind. In P.E. class we learned how to play "Steal the Bacon". This game has been around for awhile and each child has a number on his or her team. Then everyone listens for a number to be called. The players from each team run to get to the bacon (beanbag) first when their number is called. Whoever can get back to the team first without being tagged earns a point for the team. This is a good game to help kids pay attention. If a child gets tagged, then the other team gets a point. Later in the afternoon we continued to work on sets of tens and counting by tens. We also have been working on graphing. Today the students graphed a pattern block design. It was a challenge for some to follow the model and make the design to the side. After some orientation changes, many were able to copy the design with success. This is a very good thing to try and it helps spatial skills as well as following a design model. Then others took it a step further and made new and improved designs. |
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