Apples, Apples, Apples!

Our theme for this past week was APPLES!  We introduced the apple theme by working with our short a sound and making the apple shape book with the short a pictures inside.  Our centers were all apple themed also.

 

They listened to the story Apples, Apples, Apples, and then played a game called “Rotten Apple”.  This game had our vocabulary words on it. They drew a card and read the word on the card, If they knew the word they got to keep the card. If they drew a card with an apple with a worm in it, they had to call out “Rotten Apple!” and they lost all the cards they had collected.  They had a lot of fun playing this game.

This game was Rhyming with Johnny Appleseed. They found rhyming pairs of short a words. 

At this center they ordered numbered apples from least to greatest.

Students drew cards with math facts on them and used counters to join sets to find the sum for the game Apple Addition.

This center was geared towards handwriting. They copied a poem using their neatest handwriting using their lines and spaces and then illustrated the poem.

 

During one of our desk jobs the students made a shape book called All About Apples.

Labeling the parts of an apple was an art job we did during our center desk job.

 

Another desk job during centers was making these torn apple trees.

These are our “Happy Apple Men”!  They are proud of their art jobs!

We combined our apple theme with a few math lessons also.  On the promethean we worked on ordering 2 numbers from least to greatest and then did 3 numbers and then 4 numbers in order from least to greatest.

We also read a Dr. Seuss story Ten Apples Up on Top and then did a math activity on the promethean where the students were pictured with apples up on top.  They had to figure out the combination of red and green apples “up on top”.

After doing the activity on the promethean we went back to our desks and rolled red and green dice to make combinations of our own and put them in a book of our classmates pictures called “How Many Apples Up On Top"?”

 

        

The last activity we did was read the story The Seasons of Arnold’s Apple Tree. We then painted our own seasons of an apple tree.

    

As you can see this was a busy week of Apples, Apples, Apples!

Welcome to Maize Elementary & Conferences

It was a pleasure getting a chance to meet with each of you at our conferences last week.  The kids were excited to show off their portfolio of writing samples and assessments that we have worked on so far this year.  Thanks for all you do to help support what we do here at school and thanks for sharing your sweet children with me too! 

Learning Our Short Vowel Sounds!

For the past few weeks we have worked hard to learn the short vowel sounds of “a” like in apple and short “i” like in pig. We have done a lot of word building and decoding of short a and short i words. We made short a apple shape books with pictures and words that have the short a sound and a short i pig book with pictures and words that make the short i sound.  Next week we will introduce short o.

 

Shake the Beans!

We have spent the past week working on combinations of 6, 7, 8, and 9 and learning how to read addition sentences.  We played the game “Shake the Beans” where we shook two sided beans and wrote the facts on a chart showing each combination for the number we were working on.  They really enjoyed the game and worked with partners to show their problems.

Potluck!

We ended our ABC week with a fun story called Potluck.  It is about twins named Alpha and Betty that invite their friends from A-Z to a potluck.  Each child brings something that begins like the first letter of their name.  It was a lot of fun eating our way from A-Z!  For some reason I lost the pictures when I downloaded them to my computer, so I made a list for you to see what the kids brought. The kids also made a class book about our potluck that will be out for you to view at conferences next week.  Thanks for making learning so much fun and for sending the items to share with the class! I am sorry the pictures didn’t turn out!

 

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom! Look what we do in our room!

ABC week has been a lot of fun. We have read and ate our way from A-Z! We enjoyed the story Chicka Chicka Boom Boom by Bill Martin Jr. and then made our own name trees.

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We read the story Dr. Seuss’ ABC and made our own class book that we hope you will come and see next week at conferences.

Here is a look at some of our short a and ABC centers:

At this center the kids rolled a cube with short a words on it and earned pieces to make these short a cats.

 

Here they had to build short a words and “Paint the Words”.

At guided reading we used the –at –an and –am word families to build short a words.

Learning to write complete sentences with capital letters and periods was another center we had this week using our sight words and color words.

At this center the kids had to sort the picture cards that were missing their beginning sound and write the words from A to Z!  They sure work hard at centers!  It has been another fun filled week!

ABC Week!

This week we are celebrating the mastery of all of our letters and sounds from our Back to School Theme.  We are using the alphabet to do a lot of reading, writing, and creating  from A to Z!  Here are some websites to play some fun ABC games.

                                      (Click on the pictures to play games on these websites)

                     

I will be posting more pictures of our ABC Week soon! 

                  *Special thanks to Mrs. Bumgardner for sharing these websites and ideas of these games!!