Literacy Work Stations

When I pull students for small group reading instruction, the rest of the class works in literacy work stations. The work stations are a fun way for students to practice their reading and writing skills. Below are some the work stations we currently have and some of the skills we are or will be working on soon.

Writing Station: Students work on writing their name, word wall words, words found around the room as well as create books, stories, and letters to friends.

Sand Station: Students conduct letter hunts, practice making their name and word wall words with abc cookie cutters and sequence the alphabet.

Big Book Station: Students practice pointing to the words and reading, making their reading sound like talking, finding word wall words, letters, and the beginning and end of a sentence.

Puzzle Station: Student practice putting the letters in their name and order and sequencing the alphabet.

Block Station: Students practice socialization skills and create maps.

ABC/Word Work Station: Students practice letters/sounds/word wall words and work with rhyming and word family words.

Library Station: Students practice pointing and reading grade level texts. They also may look at the pictures and tell the story. They read to stuffed animals and tell each other about the stories they've read.

Computer Station: Students practice letters, sounds, and reading on Starfall.com.

Homeliving Station: Students practice socialization skills, as well as reading and writing menus, grocery lists, etc.

Pocket Chart Station: Students match names and photos of classmates, first and last names, sequence events and poems we've read.

Poetry Station: Students practice pointing to the words and reading, making their reading sound like talking, finding word wall words, letters, and the beginning and end of a sentence.

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A Few Highlights from Last Week

We graphed our favorite shape and analyzed the data!

We read The Bus for Us by Suzanne Bloom. We worked on retelling the story with a partner. We graphed how we get to school and analyzed the data. We also illustrated the way we wished we could come to school as a story response.

We learned about the Preamble to the Constitution and what it means. The students talked with a partner about what it means and shared our their ideas. We choose what we thought was the 3 most important ideas and wrote about them. We also illustrated what the different phrases meant. We learned about the American flag and what the colors mean. Then we discussed the importance of the Pledge and how to appropriately say it to show we are proud of our country.



Properties

We have been learning about properties and how our 5 senses help us learn about the world around of and the properties of objects. Students brought an object from home and described their objects using the properties of size, shape, color, texture, and mass in groups.

Community Helpers and Shapes

We learned about different community helpers and their jobs. We also learned about school helpers and their jobs. We wrote and illustrated a page for our class book: When I grow up, I want to be a ___.

We learned about two dimensional shapes and their properties. Then as a culminating activity, the students worked in small groups to give each other clues about which shape to draw in their shaving cream. The students described the mystery shape using the properties (sides, vertices, rounds, straight sides, etc).

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom

We read Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and we watched the scholastic video which is the story put to music and the students LOVED it! We did several letter and name activities with the story.

We found the first letter of our name somewhere in our room and then we cut out coconuts and wrote the first letter of our name on them. We put them on our coconut tree we made with Mrs. Guntorius' class.

We also colored and cut our own coconut trees and mounted it on construction paper. We wrote our names and then count and wrote how many letters are in our names. We will make these into a class book.

We also explored a coconut using our five senses! The students loved this, however only a couple liked the way the coconut taste.

Five Senses and Weather

In science this week, we read Parts by Ted Arnold. On Monday we talked about the different parts of his body that were coming "unglued" and we illustrated a picture of our bodies and wrote our names. Then on Tuesday we read the story again and focused on which of his senses were making him aware of his different body parts coming apart. Then the students colored and cut out pictures and glued them on their body pictures to match the sense they would use to experience that object.

We also learned about different types of weather and the seasons. We talked about how the seasons are a cycle because they repeat in the same order every year. We also talked about clothing that is appropriate for each season. We illustrateded appropriate seasonal clothing and labeled the seasons on a paper plate.