Today we read, One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish in honor of Dr. Seuss week. The class LOVED reading this story to identify all the rhyming words and words that were opposites. They also liked telling me what words were onomatopoeia words (sound words such as: cuckoo, sizzle, bam, splat) too. I was so impresssed with how well they identified all these words and they also liked seeing all the "silly" made up animals Dr. Seuss put in this book too. To go along with the story, I paired up the class and they worked with a partner to do a goldfish math activity. First they had to estimate how many crackers were in the cup and write it down. Then they had to spill out the crackers and count how many total there were and record it on their sheet. They were excited to see if their estimate was right or if it was close to the amount they thought it was. Next. they grouped the crackers by color and graphed it on the paper. They then had to answer what color they had the greatest amount of and least of. They did a FABULOUS job working with their partners on this activity today and I was so impressed with how well they all followed my directions, stayed on task from beginning to end and how well they recorded the results on their papers! WOW!!!
Not only did they love the Dr. Seuss activity, but they also loved being scientists this afternoon! We started a "new" science unit today which is about "Pushes and Pulls." For the first lesson today, we talked about what motion is and how the speed of motion can changed depending on what the object is. We also did a little Simon Says activity where I asked them to do many different types of motions and we talked about them at the end of the game.
With the lesson, we watched a video of a ball, a paper airplane and a batman toy. We talked about the motion of the object in the video and how it moved across the screeen. Did it go straight? Did it zig-zag? Did it go fast? Did it go slow? Next we talked about things that we would see in motion if we went for a walk outside. We imagined it in our brains. They had many great ideas to share and were all very eager to share them with the class. I was planning on taking them for a walk for this part of our science lesson but unfortuately it was raining pretty hard outside during this time. We had a great discussion about it instead. With their ideas in mind, we then recorded one of them in their science journal like real scientists do. Scientists study things and record observations in their journals. I was thrilled with their drawings and couldn't belive the wonderful detail they added. They did a good job drawing lines to show the motion of the objects outside and wrote down if their object would move fast or slow. Way to go, K-1!
Besides these fun lessons, we also did so much more in the classroom today. We compared two stories and talked about how they are the same and different, learned more about the "wh" digraph and practiced reading and writing words with that particular sound, we learned more about subtraction stories, etc. It was a fun-filled day! I am looking forward to "Wacky Wednesday" tomorrow and hope my kinder friends join me in dressing a little "wacky!" Have a great night, everyone!
