Week 8-Food-Peek at My Week

Is it a theme? Is it a unit? Is it an integrated curriculum? Is it a study? These are all words that have been used to describe basically the same thing. Sometimes, the words become negative, mostly because the strategies aren't executed correctly. This often leads to principals making blanket statements that we are no longer doing______. You fill in the blank. Here are a few guidelines that I like to use:

• Pick "units" based on your science and social studies curriculum.
• Think of how you can teach more than one standard at a time.
• Be sure your activities are content rich, provide for higher order thinking.
• Just because you are matching capital and lower case letters on pieces of bread, that doesn't mean you are integrating your curriculum.
• Use your unit to develop high interest activities.
• Use science and social studies as a way to teach reading and writing.  We read and write so that we can learn about the things that interest us, right?

Week 8? Really? Fall Break is almost here!
This week finds us on our last week of unit 2 in Reader’s Workshop. All week we will be working on retelling using The 3 Bears as our text.
Writer’s Workshop has us reviewing all the things that good writers do.
Foundational skills: vowel sounds, poetry, how to writing, blending phonemes and sight words!

They loved this sight word soup pot game! Megan took our large soup pot to use to play the game.
Now how about printing? I know, I know, color ink.  Here’s what we do…

• We print everything using “multiple” in the print menu.
• We are able to choose how many pages we want to print on each page.
• For this game, we printed two pages on one piece of paper.
• This cuts ink, cardstock, and laminating in half! Plus, now it is ready for next year!

We are finishing up our food unit this week.

This is actually one of our centers from last week. They are doing well at the “cut a sentence” books. These books are great practice for sight words, for sentence structure (Does it sound right?), for reminding readers to look at the pictures, and for reminding them to look at the first letter in the word.

Last week we played the grocery store beginning sound sort during our foundational skills time. This week they are doing the cut and paste version as one of the centers. Looking for a little more of a challenge? Have the kids stretch out the words.

Our “can do” centers are the same as last week---no changes.
We have moved Math Attack to one of the Have To areas. They did great with this last week and are ready for more independence.  The kids are loving the games in our DI Math Small Group activities. So simple….so fun! Our “can do’s” are the same as last week. No need to change these every week. Remember I only have my kids visit each of the five areas one time a week. So, keeping the same “can do” centers for a few weeks works well for both me and them!
They loved this game from our food unit. Here’s how you play.

• Roll the dice. So let’s say it lands on 5.
• Put 5 pieces of pepperoni on your pizza.
• Now, roll again. Let’s say it lands on 3.
• What do you have to do so that now you have 3 pieces of pepperoni? Do you need to take some off or put some on? (Take off 2) How do you know?
• Roll again……
• Keep playing until time runs out.

Now hop on over to Deedee’s blog to see what other bloggers have posted for a peek at their week!