Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Color words and Daily Fix It

It has been a busy couple of weeks with tons of stuff going on.  I was super bummed yesterday when I had to be away for a math training.  Its so hard to plan for a sub especially for a Monday.  We start a new story every Monday, new vocabulary words, new sight words, new centers, new homework packets, and new fluency readers.  That's a lot to miss and to expect of a substitute, but Miss Vickie always does a great job.  I was extremely happy to be back in the classroom with my kiddos today!  
 
Here is our color words chart we made to hang up in the classroom.  We will refer to it throughout the year. 
 
 I opened up a new center this week to help students recognize color words.  It is surprising how long this can take students at first, but they quickly pick up on the concept and get much faster.  I will add another step to this once they bacome more familiar with it.
 I started a daily journal last week and the kids are doing great with it.  Getting their journal and crayons out is their first task each morning besides getting unpacked.  We do a quick daily fix it which is mainly just capitalizing the first letter in a sentence and putting a punctuation mark at the end.  I write the sentence incorrectly and then we correct it as a class.  The students then copy it in their journal.  We also do another activity each day in the journal.  We are currently working on labeling.  The students will draw a picture and label items in the picture.  They are not expected to write the words correctly but they are expected to atleast write the beginning sound of each word. 
 
Today's entry was:
Draw a picture of two people playing together and label it.
 
I will try to post some pictures of what journals look like now so you can see our progress in the future.
daily fix it above

Since students are expected to label items with beginning sounds, we spend some time each day working on beginning sounds.  Here is a picture of us working on the letter Tt.  The students came up with items to list and the student who thought of it got to draw a picture of it during center time.
 
Students will be dismissed early on Friday (11:15) this week and next week due to homecoming festivities.