Week Peek - 9/30/11

Here is a peek at my week...

Make sure to hop over to Clutter Free Classroom to Link up and see many more peeks into our colleagues plan books.  I am loving seeing what others are doing and I am learning so much about how to improve my craft.  Even after teaching 15 years, you can always learn something new.  I am a lifetime learner just as I strive to encourage my students to be.  :)

My students' behavior has been really great this week!  (knock on wood)  The "Rainbow Clip Chart" as I like to call it is working fantastically.  I usually use the traffic light system, or a flipping card system, but always had trouble with rewarding the kids who are good all day everyday.  This chart helps me use positive praise as a motivator for those who do get a little off track.  It also makes me pay more attention and be on the lookout for those positive behaviors I want to encourage.  I like that the really good kids don't have to wait till Friday to get a treat.

Look at all the sparkling jewels on those clips.  :)  They get a jewel when they get to pink.  Once they have  3 jewels, they select a reward from my Best "Bee-havior" Catalog.  It includes things like eat with the teacher, bring a stuffed animal, etc. Free things that are not candy.  A colored clip means they have already been to pink 3 times and get a new clip.  They love it!

We worked on some word families this week.  During whole group reading we started with writing "hat" on the board and then changed either the first or last consonant to make a new word.  Then we wrote word family words on beautiful fall leaves and glued them together to hang from the ceiling.  It really made a gorgeous decoration for the room and we learned something too.  :)  

Please excuse the chairs being up, I took this after the kids were gone.  

In Reading we finished up our unit on Families this week.  I really enjoyed talking to the kids about their families and getting to know them a little more.  I love reading books about families sharing love and helping each other.  Their favorite book was "Bee-Bim-Bop"  about a little girl who helps her mom cook dinner for the family.  At the end they put all the food in a bowl and mix it up like crazy.  :)  The kids love it!  We made a family tree to finish up our unit.  I failed to take a picture of it, but if you look really hard in the top left corner of the picture above you can see one.  :)  We cut out a trunk and green tree top, then glued them on a blue paper.  The apples had family names on them and they glued them into the tree.  They added details like grass, clouds, sun and flowers.  They turned out cute.  I will add a picture on Monday.  :)

Here is a picture of watercolor painting activity we did as part of  our  Healthy Foods unit in Science.  I have never liked painting cause of the mess, but they did really well with it.  I was pleasantly surprised.  

In math we are finishing up our unit on the numbers 6-10.  The series we have wants us to go straight to adding and subtracting next.  (I know crazy right, they barely can count consistently and you want me to teach them to subtract!! That is a later in the year skill)  We are going to skip a few chapters and go into shapes and patterns next.  I think that is a smart choice for us and the kids.

In writing we are working on writings about our family.  We are using sight words and trying our best to write the sounds we hear for at least one word in the sentence.

"I go to the bech." - pretty good!

L - "I go muding."  R - "I go srfing."
I had an "-ing" word on the board and directed them to look there for the letters that make the /ing/ sound.  I love that they are getting capital at beginning and period at the end.  We need to keep working on spacing.  :)  

That is our week!  Thanks for peeking!  I can't wait to come see yours!