Snow Day Update

So here's to my fifth snow day this year... very bittersweet. Love the time to think through lessons and catch up on some good shows, but miss my kiddos and HATE getting behind schedule with our units. I'm planning for our introduction to subtraction and trying to imagine how in the world they will understand "_ fewer than..." My kiddos have just grasped addition and already have difficulty with vocabulary and complex sentences because they speak English as a second language. I'm planning on using tons of visuals and manipulatives, but I know they will need to know "how many fewer" and be able to answer that question. Thinking about phrasing it as how many more do we need to make the two groups equal (something they are familiar with).. then directly following that with but instead we have ___ fewer. Hope it clicks!

Anyway, here's a look at our past week (which was all broken up with snow days... and so will continue into this week's end... yes, we had two more snow days this Monday and today...)

After testing the kiddos on their ability to write all of the upper and lowercase letters in the alphabet, I decided it would be a smart idea to make a fun center for practicing the shapes and lines in our beloved alphabet ! We used bendy sticks (reusable sticky colored sticks) to mold and learn the lines and curves in all of our letters and some numbers. The kiddos loved the new way to practice their letters and numbers!

 The recent tests also led me to discover that a few of my friends still need much practice with counting to 100. The biggest issue seems to be with going from a __ 9 to the next group of ten. Yet they can count to 100 by tens so I gave them a little practice with counting by ones in a fun, visual self-correcting way! 

Kiddos rolling and recording their two digit number using the square frames

We're nearing the end of our unit on matter and so I had the students complete a semi-independent sorting activity. I let the kiddos have some choice in this activity; whether they want to look though magazines for solids, liquids, and gasses or use some pre-printed pictures. This was an easy way to differentiate the project. Found these at https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Scooting-Through-Second and https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Sheila-Melton

At the writing table, this week the kiddos wrote about their favorite winter activity. They love free writes and it gave me a chance to work with them one-on-one and really see their abilities in action. There was a lot of Frozen and Elsa talk going on ....

One of my kiddos sounding out her "h" words!

At literacy center time, some of my advanced kiddos were working on putting sight words together to make sentences that make sense. I found this super cute activity on  Yara's blog at http://www.yarasseaofknowledge.blogspot.com.au. Using this activity, I was able to see my kiddos' abilities to fix word order, identify deleted or added words, and transfer these words onto paper to make a sentence. I will definitely put this activity out again, my kiddos LOVED coming up with their own sentences!

Pointing to each word while we read the sentence!