It's Fall, Y'all!

It's my favorite time of year!  I love the grey weather (only for so long) and the sweaters, and the orange, and the fireplaces and the hot chocolate and fuzzy pajamas.  Best. Time. Of. Year.

Speaking of which, we just finished our weather unit and started a community workers unit last week.  If you remember in one of my last posts, I posted a picture of a future pictorial input.  Well, here's what the finished product looked like:

The kids really liked sitting through this one because they had plenty of opportunities to guess what season I was drawing. 

This week, we started blending syllables together to read words!  Ahh!!!  My kiddos are growing up so fast!  But you know what, they're doing an amazing job.  To help make it a little easier, these were our centers:

Starting at the top left, that is the teacher run center.  We chanted our syllables with "a", then I showed them my thinking in figuring out what the word was and we went through a series of picture cards together and found the syllables that belong in those words.  We even go to write them on a whiteboard!

Moving clockwise, the next one was a syllable matching game.  Match the syllables together and then write a list of words with "a". 

Next up we had a "Me gusta" book that the kids had to work on the carpet.  Using words written on sentence frames, they had to recreate the book (match individual words to the word in a sentence on the strip), then put an individual copy of the book together for themselves.  These books went in their book boxes.

This was a fun center.  I gave them foam die and a recording sheet.  Each number on the die corresponded to a syllable.  They were to roll the die and then record the syllable on the sheet.  SO FUN!

Lastly, we traced a word and then used stamps to stamp the word in the box.

My vice principal and assistant superintendent of bilingual ed came in to observe me during these centers.  I was blessed with receiving their approval and praise.  Phew! 

In math, we are still working on the numbers 6-10, although this week we'll be going back to 0-5 (since that's the major focus in the new common core standards).  But here's what we did:

Starting in the top left corner and moving clockwise, we had a numbers 0-10 sort.  They had a number card, a tally card and a dot card.  They had to sort them by number.

Moving on to number sequences.  What number is missing?  Find it, put it in the right place and then write it on the recording sheet. 

Next, match the number of beads to the number on the top of the pipe cleaner.

Tons, and tons of number writing worksheets.  Oddly enough, they loved this center!  Something about doing worksheets that makes kids feel like BIG kids. 

I got this wheel from this blog.  The kiddos have to find the write clothespin and match it to the number on the wheel.  Fantastic!

And lastly, we just started our community workers unit.  Embedded in that is the mapping unit.  So we started with a map of the United States and will be zooming in on our school and then zooming back out to match community workers to the map.  Here is the United States:

 

I projected this page from the book Me on the Map, traced it onto a piece of butcher paper and then did it again with markers when the kids were there. 

I'm working on some sight word worksheets, so I'll be back up and posting once that packet is done!