Making Learning Fun

This week was filled with great literature and fun learning activities.  We got a new math series this year and it constantly spirals through all the standards.  This helps ensure that the concepts taught are being seen consistently.  This is much different than the typical, you teach it once in the year and never see it again.  The students are really able to retain their math facts with this series as well.  This week one of the lessons taught was on counting by 5's and using tally marks.  I decided it would be much more fun and hands-on if the students learned how to make tally marks with wiki sticks.  I modeled making tally marks to count the number of students who were eating a school lunch vs. the number of students that brought a lunch from home.  Then, we used the wiki sticks to tally the number of fingers and toes we had and then practiced counting by 5's.  Here is a video of one of the groups.  They loved it.

The students were also introduced to a new word work activity this week...sight word string up.  The activity consists of letters, pipe cleaners, and sight word cards.  The students use the letters to string up their sight words.  Afterwards, I had the students write the word in their word work journals.  Up to 75% of words in children's literature consists of sight words.  Learning these words is the first step to reading fluently and accurately.  We have been working really hard in class to not only learn how to read these words, but to spell them too.  We have a word wall in class that displays the sight words or trick words from our Fundations unit. {Don't forget, the sight words/trick words your child needs to know are sent home each time we begin a new Fundations unit.  The Fundations packets I send home consist of the trick word flash cards.  I hope you all have been cutting them out and keeping them for practice.} Learning to spell these words will help us become a better writer as well.  The students enjoyed the new activity and what a better way to practice the reading and writing of our sight words than to use letter beads and pipe cleaners.

We have also been continuing to work on retelling the stories we read.  Retelling is a comprehension strategy that will help us understand what we read.  This week we read Bear Snores On.  I modeled using the retell rope with this book.  Then, the students were given the character pictures of the story. They colored the pictures and glued them in order on a sentence strip and made a retell hat.  The next day, we reread the story.  This time, after the reading, the students partnered up and used their retell hats to retell the story.  They did a fantastic job!  They are really getting the hang of retelling using the retell rope.

UPDATE:  Here is a picture of the Martin Luther King, Jr. character trait silhouettes we made.  Last week I blogged about these, but I showed an older photograph of what I used to put on the silhouettes (vocabulary words).  This year I opted to having the students review character traits and placing three words that described Martin Luther King, Jr. on the silhouettes.  They did a fabulous job and it was a wonderful review.

Daily 5

You've probably heard me mention the daily 5 more than once.  Let me give you some background on what the daily 5 entails.  Daily 5 is simply a way to set up literacy stations in the classroom.  It consists of daily literacy activities that the students are involved in:  Read to Self, Read to Someone, Work with Words, Work on Computers, and Listen to Reading.  These five stations are the rotation of our literacy work station or daily 5.  Depending on the day, the students will also work in a guided reading group with Mrs. Dusenberg or myself.  During read to self, students are doing just that....reading to themselves.  It takes a long time to build our reading stamina so that the entire class is reading for the whole time.  During this time, I meet individually with the students.  I listen to them read, coach them, and give them reading goals to work towards.  I love this time of the day because I get to see all the strategies your child employs while reading.  During read to someone, students are doing just that....reading to someone.  We've talked a lot about partner reading in our class and what that should look like and sound like.  Students have different partners daily.  During this time, students get to share the books they've been working on with someone in class.  They get to coach them as well.  If a child can teach/coach another child with a word that gives them an even better understanding of the strategy.  During work with words students are using their spelling patterns to learn to spell.  All spelling lists are differentiated according to the primary spelling inventory the students took at the beginning of the year.  They work on their words for 2 weeks, are assessed, and then given a new list of words to work on.  During work on computers, students are working on the computers we have in the classroom.  They might be reading on Raz-Kids, playing a reading game on the Promethean board, building words on Starfall, etc.  There are so many reading programs and games out there and I try to utilize what fits the needs of my students at that particular time.  Listen to reading is when a group of students listen to books on CD players that I have in my classroom.  Later in the year, it will be when students record and listen to themselves read on the iPods.  All of these literacy stations are going on while the teachers in the room are pulling small differentiated reading groups back to work on reading skills that are at their just-right levels.  I hope this gives you a better understanding the literacy stations in our classroom.  Below are some pictures of the stations in our room.