Owl Babies is a tender tale that reminds the youngest of children that Mommy always comes back.
We read this book as part of Forest Birds Week.
Following this, students engaged in a literacy tray. For those of you not familiar, a literacy tray is a tool educators use to organize plot themes and ideas for young learners.
They can involve sensory materials, counting activities, and words associated with a story. This activity consisted of students using blocks to spell the word HOOT.
Counting feathers involved sorting feathers and matching them to a numeral.
For this activity, students placed the feathers onto a number mat.
This number contained three different nests.
Affixed to these nests were the numbers four, five, and six.
Three dimensional media occupies space defined through the dimensions of height, weight and depth. It includes sculpture, installation and performance art, decorative art and product design.
Two processes are responsible for all three dimensional art: additive, in which material is built up to create form, and subtractive, where material is removed from an existing mass, such as a chunk of stone, wood, or clay.
The additive piece that we created involved a few key materials.
With flour, twigs, googly eyes, and pipe cleaners, we assembled them to create two items: a bird and his nest. Students modeled their nests in several different ways. They enjoyed making up stories about their birds and watching their friends.
The origins of the long s, ſ, can be traced all the way back to old Roman cursive, a script used in Rome for everyday, informal writing from the first century AD to about the third century.
In this script, the letter s was written as a vertical downstroke with a small curve at the end of it, and a diagonal upstroke at the top. It looked almost like a check mark, with an added diagonal line on top of it. I
n new Roman cursive, which developed between the third and seventh century AD, s was written almost as we write the lowercase r today: a vertical downstroke, followed by an upstroke with a curve.
For this activity, we learned all about the long s sound found in the word SPIDER.
To do so, students used manipulatives (in this case, toy spiders) to cover the letter S.
This letter S was placed onto a letter card. Students enjoyed playing with the spiders and putting them into different shapes on the letter.
Manipulatives give children the opportunity to interact with the alphabet through hands-on play.
They are able to feel the shape of the objects and arrange multiple items to form letters and words.
They can see the curves and the lines that come together to form each letter, and some manipulatives even allow children to explore letter formation and tracing.
We used manipulatives (in this case, letter cards) as part of our bat theme.
To do this, we did a couple of things.
First, the students were given a note card with the word BAT written on it.
Then, they were given the cards (manipulatives) to match to the correct letter.
Lastly, we sounded out each letter until we created the word!
Measurement concepts are often a part of children’s interactions.
“My dad is bigger,” “I can jump higher,” and “I have more play dough than you!” are common comparisons that children make.
From the child’s perspective, these statements compare quantity; however, they also provide a nice introduction to measurement.
Unfortunately, it is an often neglected content standard in early childhood classrooms.
Throughout the many projects we do throughout the week, we are constantly measuring, comparing, and contrasting items related to the theme.
For this activity, your little one was presented with a problem.
They were each given five different-sized blocks with pictures of different-sized spiders on them. They were then asked to sort them by size. The target words for this activity were small, big, bigger, biggest, smaller, and smallest.
There are over 1600 species of bamboo around the world.
A member of the grass family, it is found on every continent except Europe and Antarctica.
Bamboo’s resilience, versatility, and unique ability to grow quickly and create complex root systems make it a vital species in its native ecosystem.
It provides a habitat for biodiversity, reduces land degradation, stabilizes slopes, and produces oxygen, absorbs heavy metals, sequesters carbon, and has over 1000 uses – including replacing plastics, paper, and wood.
As part of our Forest Bears week, we decided to explore this fascinating ecosystem.
To do so, students wore panda bear masks.
They were also encouraged to interact with our “real” bamboo forest – a collection of bamboo stalks “planted” at the school.
Fine motor skills are finger and hand skills such as writing, cutting, opening lunch boxes, and tying shoe laces.
The development of these skills relies upon age appropriate development of physical skills (such as core trunk control and shoulder strength) providing the stable base from which the arm and hand can then move with control.
For this activity, we used Q-tips and paint to write on the moon!
To begin with, students dipped their Q-tips in white paint. They they added white dots onto the word MOON.
In the past, spelling was usually taught as a separate subject; memorization was thought to be the key to its mastery. Even now, most elementary schools using spelling series and treat spelling as a subject separate from the other language arts.
However, during the past decade, language researchers have she new light on the spelling process. The acquisition of spelling rules is now viewed as a complex developmental process.
Once the stages of the process are identified, elementary teachers can help students develop strategies for learning standard English spelling, and they can assess students’ progress more accurately. For this activity, students used blocks to spell the word PLANET. Initially, they were presented with a scrambled jumble of letters.
They were then asked to point out the identification of each letter. Following this, the teacher helped them with figuring out which sound each letter made. Lastly, the students matched the block letters with the letters on the word mat to spell PLANET!
Counting can be a fun task for young children. Children will begin by counting forward and should be provided a lot of experience practicing this new skill. They will also begin to recognize written number symbols.
Kids will start as “pre-counters” saying numbers in no particular order. This is typical of a two-year-old child. The next level is “chanters”. At this stage, children may say numbers in a sequence but run them together.
If the child is interrupted, they will have to start over at the beginning versus where they left off. Finally, “reciters” can verbally count to five, ten and so on. This is a very advanced skill and should not be expected during this age period.
A more advanced skill of math is one-to-one correspondence. This is also typical of a three to four-year-old child. They will be able to point at objects and count them at the same time. This activity strengthens this skill. For this counting activity, students practiced counting planets.
They did this by picking them up with tweezers and placing them around the sun. The number they selected was chosen through the rolling of a dice.
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