Monday 16 October 2017

Week of October 16 - Letter and Word of the Week

Each week, we will be looking at a letter and a word of the week.  The intent is that the letter of the week is for the jk students and the word of the week is for the sk students.  The word of the week is a high frequency word that we call a "popcorn" word.  These popcorn words are words that are found in simple books which are easy to sound out for the children.  We will get a new letter and word every Monday.  Our activities on Monday will involve this letter/word at some of our tabletops.  I would encourage you to check the blog at the beginning of the week so that you can ask your child to point the word out during nightly reading (sk's), practise printing the letter/word with their magic finger, think of words that have the letter sound in them, etc.  Make it fun! 

Our letter of the week is the letter "a".  We learned that this letter makes 2 sounds ("ahh' and it says it's own name "a").  We had lots of fun with the letter a.  All the children with an "a" in their name stood up.  We noticed that most of the kids in the class have an "a" in their name so it must be an important letter!  We also came up with a list of words that have an "a" in them.  

Our word of the week is "a".  We read a poem about pumpkins and the children had fun "buttering" the popcorn word!  We will do this every Monday.  We will read a poem together and keep an eye out for the word of the week.  The children will take turns "buttering" the word of the week.  This means they will colour the word in yellow. See the pictures below from today.

The sk students then went on to write a sentence or a thought using the word "a".  Mrs. T and I were so proud of their work.  See pictures of their work below.

The students also took great interest in our pumpkin exploration.  They enjoyed writing and drawing about the different pumpkins that we had on the table.  Some of the things they wrote about was the pumpkin's size, colour and the difference between the variety of pumpkins.

We also used pumpkins for Math today.  We turned pumpkins into geoboards and explored shapes using the elastics on the pegs.  This was a big hit in the classroom this afternoon!

Last week, we had a lovely day learning outside.  It was a brisk morning and the kids were happy to be outside! They came in refreshed and hungry!  It was so nice to be able to take advantage of the outdoor classroom and learn in a different environment.  We will definitely be using the outdoor classroom again soon!

On Friday, we came together as a kinder group and celebrated a lovely Thanksgiving mass.  The children were engaged and did a great job sitting and participating.

Here are some picture from today and the later part of last week: