Last Week/This Week in Pictures

So sorry I've been absent for the past week y'all. It's been CRAZY BUSY! Here's some of the things we did that I managed to capture. 

We are settling into a routine of our reading block. I started off my 30 min whole group reading by going over Daily Objectives so the kids will know what we are going to be doing. Kinda like an agenda. If you want to know how I do our 2 hour reading block, let me know and I'll do a post about it.  I *promise* an explanation of centers and how I rotate and squeeze it all in is coming soon! I just haven't had time to sit and plan out the post yet. :)

We did our first labeling activity last week with our story, Sam, Come Back! 

We were introduced to schema Susie and talked about responsibilities that pet owners have.

 Now let me talk about math for a minute, y'all. We switched to a new series this year and oh my word is it hard! We started addition the very first day! We usually don't start addition until October and now we are doing it day 1. My poor babies were almost as overwhelmed as I was. The lesson was wanting us to add 6 and 4 and some didn't even remember what a 6 looked like! We definitely needed some number review. We've decided to take a week off from the series and do an "All About Numbers" review. I'm using the fabulous Kim Adsit's All About Numbers unit to teach with this week. I'm also taking this time to introduce our calendar routine by using Cara Caroll's Calendar Companion, which by the way is my FAVORITE TpT purchase of all time. 

I made these anchor chart posters, inspired by Kim's Adsit's, for each number. I'm just displaying numbers 1-5 right now.

 I'm also using this week to review some of the concepts and addition strategies that we struggled with in Chapter 1. For example, lots of my kids had problems identifying the addends in an addition problem, so I created this chart to help. I walked around with it and had individual students come up and circle the addends in each problem. It really helped. Tomorrow we will identify the sum.

Since our sound skill for the week was short a we read a book called That Fat Cat by Katie Schultz.

This is not a well known book. It won a read aloud award from Books Million, but what I love about it is that fact that the author, Katie Shultz, wrote the story when she was still in high school and she is from Tuscaloosa, which is about 2 and 1/2 hours away from where I live. The story is made up almost entirely of short a words so this was a perfect read for us. 

We charted how many short a words were in the story.

That's all for now! Happy week y'all! :)