Peek at My Week-Week 4-Family Fun and Freebees

Four weeks, already! I know for some of my northern friends this is your FIRST week, but we are finally feeling like we are getting into a routine.
So here’s what’s happening in Megan’s room:
During my morning time I am introducing another one of Shari’s song books. I told you last week how I made them into listening centers. Be sure and look back at Week 3 Peek at my Week if you missed it. I am doing the Letter Family song. You can get the music from Shari’s website www.kidscount1234.com or find her on itunes and the music book is in my store.
I can’t believe we are on our last week for Unit 1 in Reader’s Workshop. We are so proud of how our kids are doing. On Friday we will finish up the unit with our celebration.
This week during writer’s we are really working on pictures tell a story. We have found that Megan’s kids are drawing pictures, but then really don’t have a story to tell. So we are going to be talking about characters and settings. Not really worrying about if they know those terms right yet, just that stories have people, animals and places.
We are also introducing our Sound Off chart. We will be doing one of these each week on Monday and then we will have a follow up “have to” center.
You may notice that we are playing some of the same games during our foundational time as last week. I really can’t see making a game and only using it once, the kids never seem to mind playing games more than once!
During our small group literacy centers I am introducing some of the centers that will become “have to” centers—Cut, Stack, Staple, Read and Sound Off. We use out of these two resources ALL YEAR!
Another “go to center idea”…the unit vocabulary abc books. We use these to have the children label the pictures. It is a freebee (here).
We are still using some of our have to centers as a way to be sure that each child tries out all the centers. Sometimes we think that children don’t select centers simply because they have never tried them or that they don’t even remember them.
Once again you will notice that I have blacked out the centers we haven’t introduced yet. Here is the complete chart.

So here is what Megan’s center chart looks like right now:

We are also introducing our first Post It Note Anchor Chart. We use these charts all year! Originally I really made the first chart to save paper, but here’s what I found it….after reading the first book we wrote everything about it one post it notes and put them on the left side and then the next day we wrote about the second book and put it on the right side. When we said something about the second book THAT we had ALSO said about the first book, I could move the post it note to the middle! This really helped my children to see conceptually what was happening! So, I’m kinda hooked on the whole idea of the post it note chart!
I am also starting to introduce the poetry journal. You can get a copy of the chart and the student poem as a feebee here and here.

During Math we are continuing on with our shape unit, but I am also introducing our number of the week. Each week, we make an anchor chart for a number. It takes several weeks, well 20 to be exact, to do all the numbers. It’s not about learning that “1” is a one. It’s about developing a concept of oneness.  We added in the student page as one of our “have to’s”. We will have done one together, but now I want them to do it alone. In the future I can put it as a have to OR we can just do it together.
I am going to introduce story problems to my kids this week. Keep your eyes opened for a post on Conceptual, Pictorial, and Abstract learning in math, but until then let me just say that the kids will have clip art pictures of cookies that they will manipulate to figure out the answer.
The “have to” in Area 1 is a sequencing activity for the house cookies we made last week. One thing I have learned from the upper grade teachers is to teach kids to always go back to the text. So, I will put a copy of the cookbook on the table for the kids to use to sequence the events.
We finish up math centers with some of the same “can-dos” as last week. We really only change these out about every three weeks!
You can download a copy of the peek at my week (here).
Hope you all have a great week. Be sure and hop over to Deedee’s Blog and link up for the Peek at My Week or read with other teachers are doing!