Letter V week and Letter J week

Letter V Week

We started math with a review of the shapes we had been working on. they were to build a rocket ship with only rectangles and triangles. then they switched papers with someone at their table and counted how many rectangles and triangles there were in the rocket. They really liked this! 

After our shape review, we learned anew shape called a hexagon. They learned if it has 6 sides and 6 corners it's a hexagon. Since this is V week we also learned the word vertices for corners! I believe they should know the math terminology as well.  

The students are getting more comfortable sounding out words! They are starting to sound out more words and cut out less pictures. It is amazing to see their growth!

We also made vegetable man for V week. We put a poem with it where they found the v's in the poem after they created their vegetable man.

This was a review of how many sides and vertices on the 2-d shapes we had learned. 

We are also working on sounding out words in reading. Some are still cutting out the words and some are starting to write the word next to the picture. Even though they aren't all doing the same things, they are all making progress. We don't expect them to be able to all do the same things at the same rate. But they are growing which is what we want! 

We then got to star building the shapes we had been talking about. We figured out through discussions that we could use the toothpicks as sides and the marshmallows as vertices.  We went through each shape, talking about how many sides and verities with a partner. Then they got to build them. After our 2-d shapes we also got to build a few 3-d shapes and have discussions about those as well! Below are some examples of what they built. 

We have been working hard to make our writing and reading more interesting. We love to add words to our sight words books to make them more descriptive. 

Then they can transfer those skill into their writing to make their won sentences more descriptive! This week I said write any sentence you want about a van and below are some examples. 

Awesome van.

I like the van because it is a pretty van.

I am cruising fast van.

The van is pretty. 

We did a shape hunt around the room to help them see how many shapes make up the things around them. They went around and drew the items they found for each shape. Then I had some students share the shapes they found with the class. 

At the end of the week we made a volcano! Each student got to make a piece of our volcano. Then we talked about what we thought would happen.

J week 

The students got to make their own shape creatures. Then they counted how many of each shape they used in their  creature. They turned out so cute!

For letter J we made a sheep in a jeep. They quickly noticed that jeep started with our letter of the week and that the words rhyme!

We read the book The Shape of Things together in class. I wanted them to notice that the things around them are made up of these shapes that we have been learning about. Then they got to pick one shape and turn it into something new. They had great imaginations, here are some examples. 

A circle can be a ferris wheel.

A hexagon can be a stop sign. 

A rectangle can be a trailer. 

A circle can be a jack-o-lantern. 

Then we moved into our 3-D shapes. We looked at them and recorded things we noticed about the shape. We also talked about things in real life that have that shape. They thought up some great examples. I was also proud of how they used their math words to describe the shapes.  Things such as rounded sides, roll, square bottom etc. 

The kids have wanted to use our class clickers for a long time. They are a tool that goes with our fancy board we have. Today we got to pull them out and use them! They did such a great job following the directions and using them correctly. They work sort of like texting an answer up to our board, where the board puts it into a graph. They can send letter,s words, or numbers. 

I had them spell hat and send it to me. This is a quick way for me to assess if they can hear the sounds in the word. Some may still only hear beginning and ending sounds. It gives me a quick snapshot of where they are at. 

Then we used it for math. This questions was how many sides does a triangle have? They all answered 3!

For the end of J week we did jelly bean math. the started measuring things around the room with jellybeans, then had to count how many long their items were. 

They also did addition and subtraction with their jellybeans,