Monday, October 29, 2012

Daily 5: Listen to Read


Well considering Sandy has hit Maryland full force we did not have school today and we won't be going tomorrow. Who knows about the rest of the week. No school is probably a good thing considering I my kiddos have given me a horrible cold. :-(

Like many others I started using Daily 5 in my classroom this year. I have to say that I love Daily 5!!! Not only do I love it but my kiddos love it too. They count down the minutes until it is time to do Daily 5. Then when it is time to clean up they all start to whine. Out of all the Daily 5 components the one they like the best is Listen to Read.  In my class we have 3 iPods (don't get too excited they are  my old ones) that I have loaded all my books on tape on to.  I also have 2 computers that we use for Listen to Read. Because our school system has put tight restrictions on what we can view at school my teaching buddy and I were having a hard time finding sites that would read books to students and access them at school. A fellow teacher told us that you can download you tube videos and our minds went to work.  We figured out that you tube had hundreds of children's books read by adults and fellow children.  We used savevid.com to download the books we wanted and then put them into a Smartboard file. We open these files at school and we have instant listen to read centers. My only wish now is that I had more computers.  They are easy to manage and the kids love that the pictures move.

Thursday, October 18, 2012

Down on the Farm

Here are a few things we did this week...

Our favorite book this week had to have been Mrs. Wishy Washy.  After reading the story we made mud.  Students loved putting their hands in the mud, well some of them did others just thought it was gross.  After we were done playing we made a "mud" map (our version of a bubble map).  My kiddos did a great job.  We then we used our "mud" map to write a mud poem.  We decorated the poem with the face of Mrs. Wishy Washy.



I just had to make this cow and my wonderful high school intern helped me with the pig.  The kids were so excited to get back from music and see a huge cow on the back wall. 



Another favorite book was The Cow that Said Oink.  My kids laughed all the way through this books.  They thought it was so funny that a cow would say "oink" and a pig would say "moo".  After reading the story we wrote descriptive words on post it notes and stuck them all over the cow. 



Music and poems are a big part of my classroom.  This week my kids loved listen to Jack Hartmann's Party on the Farm song.  They also loved these interactive poems.




What a great week!!! This has been one of my favorite units so far this year. Monday we are off to the pumpkin patch. 

Monday, October 8, 2012

Read for the Record-Ladybug Day

Thursday October 4th was Read for the Record Day.  This year we read Ladybug Girl and the Bug Squad.  My students had so much fun learning about Ladybugs.  We started our day out by making Ladybug Glyphs.  Students answered questions about themselves to make their own ladybugs.  It is amazing what they learned about each other.

Our reading specialist came into read Ladybug Girl and the Bug Squad to us.  While she was reading some of my wonderful parent volunteers helped me dye frosting red for our ladybug cookies.  Students decorated sugar cookies to look like ladybugs.  They loved licking the extra frosting off of the spoons.  We even added Hershey drops for ladybug spots. 




During science we created a KWL about ladybugs.  I was very impressed with everything they knew and everything they remembered from our story.



A class favorite was making their own ladybug hats.  Students loved making these and wore them all day.


We had tons of fun and can't wait to see what next years book will be.  Here is a cute ladybug sight word book you can download and share with your class.