Today we learned all about the letter Ss with Sailor Skully. The students made little sailor hats. They turned out so cute. My students are still really struggling with writing letters by themselves and cutting on lines. It is going to take a lot of practice. I ordered some golf pencils with erasers from Amazon to help those who are struggling with gripping the pencil correctly. The children are really enjoying the nightly homework as well. They told me all about hunting for Bb things last night with their Baby Bear puppets.
Here you see the puppets and the 6 picture cards for the letter Ss. As the children arrived this morning, they colored their puppets. Today we stayed at our seats to sing the song. I found an instrumental version of Old MacDonald Had a Farm. I played that in the background as we sang the Ss song. I projected the song on the document camera and moved my pictures in place as we sang each verse. After singing the seal verse, the children put the seal picture into a sandwich zip lock bag. We repeated this for each of the pictures.
Next was our whole group carpet time. We sang our phonics songs. I'm using a Jack Hartman song this year that goes through the entire alphabet, but we are doing the movements from Dr. Jean's Phonercise to it. The other songs we sing are Dr. Jean's Who Let the Letters Out and Sing Spell Read and Write's Alphabet Lane. I made a playlist on YouTube.
We are learning numbers and shapes also. I made a math circle time playlist for the beginning of the year.
One of our stories this week is Building with Dad by Carol Nevius. Since we did Bb yesterday, it was a good fit. The father is part of a construction crew building a new school, so we tied that in with letter Ss. Our playground was closed today. At first we were all sad, but then we noticed some of the building equipment from our book.
We did a fun Skittle Sorting activity with our other book this week, Brown Bear, Brown Bear What do you See? by Bill Martin Jr. I added a few leftover Teddy Grahams from our Baby Bear snack yesterday. It made a delicious but sugary snack.
Meeting with small groups is such a challenge at this point in the year. One third of the class meets with me. Another third colors their daily hats and little books for the letter. So, what do I do with the final third of the class? Last week we tried using the laptops. It was really hard for me to focus on my groups. The students kept closing out the programs. Then they couldn't log back on. One of my laptops wouldn't work and had to be sent for repairs which left one student in each group without a computer. I debated on using Kindle Fire tablets, but the kids struggled using them independently. In the end, I decided on my literacy stations. I have them all set up, and we worked on training at each station the first two weeks. They are doing phenomenal with them.
Each center has an activity that goes with our story and some fun extensions if they finish early. For example the children can do alphabet puzzles at the letter sound station or build with foam blocks at the vocabulary and writing station.
Tomorrow we do letter Mm. Since we did the Skittle sorting today, I have M&Ms all ready for tomorrow. Check back to see how the day goes and what other fun activities we do.
My Letter Bb Lesson 1 Post has a link to a video showing a sample of our small group guided reading lesson.
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