Weeks 12, 13 &14

Last week in unit study we learned about needs and wants.  Some things are things we need to survive (food, clothes, shelter), and some things we want to have (toys, pets, games).  One of the students favorite activities this week was creating a needs/wants sort.  We searched for pictures in magazines and glued them to the correct side of our paper (needs or wants).

 

In math last week we learned all about ordinal numbers.  We did several different activities to practice identifying and writing ordinals from left to right, right to left, top to bottom and bottom to top.  Here are students following directions by adding things to Christmas trees when given the ordinal number (put a star on the 3rd tree, put an ornament on the 5th tree.  

 

 Although we cover a wide variety of math concepts this year, our main focus is having the students gain a strong understanding of numbers.  One way we do this in our room is to have a daily calendar/number sense time.  I have a new calendar helper each week who is responsible for writing the number on the calendar, coloring a finger each day on the 100 fingers chart, counting how many paperclips are on our paperclip chart....

 graphing the weather, coloring the daily number on the 100 chart....

 And then all students help me write the number to indicate how many days we've been in school on the large number line above our chalkboard.  Our number line also goes in a pattern to show how numbers go in a pattern (all numbers that end in three are yellow, etc.). 

 This daily routine has really built a sense of consistency into our morning.  Students come to the carpet with their white boards and are all recording these numbers as we're adding them to our math board.  I am very pleased with their progress.

Finally, in language arts, we focused on the letter Cc.  We read books by author/illustrator Jan Brett and practiced making predictions.  We learned the sight words come, cat, just.  We are also adding last names to our word wall and writing 2 sentences about our friends for our daily Student of the Day routine. 

Next week...

In unit study we will be learning about various holidays that people celebrate in December including Christmas, Hannukah and Kwanzaa.  We will also be doing some experiments with gingerbread men because...

In language arts we are having Gingerbread Week.  We will be reading lots of different versions of the Gingerbread Man story.  We will be focusing on the letter Nn.  We will learn the sight words: house, no, big, in. 

In math we will be doing lots of practice graphing.  This is a skill that we work on at many points throughout the school year.

Have a great week!