Peek at My Week

Peek at My Week: MLK, Jr. and How to Make a Snowman

Oh my! It's been ages since I linked up with Mrs. Wills Kindergarten for a Peek at My Week...

This week, we celebrated Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. with a state holiday in his honor today, and I'll be using a few of my favorites to be sure my babies know who he was and why they were out of school.

First, my all time fave book about MLK is Martin's Big Words, and I always show it being read aloud on this link to youtube. The voice-over is amazing, and the video zooms in and out of the pages. It's absolutely captivating. Now, I've learned to put all my youtube videos in safesharetv. If you don't know about that, let me tell you...it's the BEST! Just go to your youtube video and copy the address. Then go to www.safeshare.tv and paste the link in the box. Click Generate and the website edits out all the commercials, sidebar junk, and everything else but the content of your video. Good-bye inappropriate pictures on my PolyVision board!

As you can see, from my schedule, Tuesday is a really light teaching day. My kiddos are gone to all sorts of special activities, and I have them all to myself for only a couple of hours, so, after watching Martin's Big Words, we'll talk about who he was, what he stood for, and what happened to him. Then it's off to the library and STEM lab. When I get my babies back, we'll make an MLK anchor chart together and brainstorm some ideas for how we can make the world more peaceful. I'll end the lesson with having the kids write about their dreams for a better world.

Later in the week, we'll continue using these great resources from Amy Lemons and Jessica Hursh during stations, while I meet with my Leveled Literacy Intervention reading groups:

This unit from Amy Lemons is amazing, and is perfect for keeping my little ones' minds focused on basic addition and subtraction with and without regrouping.










I'll also introduce my newest project, which I'm so excited about! I learned to make a Jeopardy-like game in PowerPoint this past week and can't wait to play it with my kiddos!

 Another great resource from Amy Lemons, this set of station activities focuses on everything from synonyms to compound words, and all sorts of goodies in between. My kids love doing stations, and they learn so much, both independently and with partners, while working on them. I have to thank my friend JWoo for introducing me to what stations even were! They have literally changed the way I teach.

I'm mixing Amy's Polar Pals with Jessica Hursh's Winter Literacy Stations for the third week this week. These activities are so similar to the ones from Polar Pals that it's perfect for reinforcement of the skills my kiddos have practiced in one or the other to mix the two, repeating the same skills!

With all these wintry stations, our read-alouds last week were all about snowmen, and we even made snowmen from, of all things, Dunkin' Donut Munchkins! 

Ok! I have no idea why he's upside-down!

or why he's sideways!

Then we began a piece of expository writing about how to build a snowman. Of course, we had fun eating the ones we made in class! This week, we'll take this piece through the writing process, with the tough tasks of revising and editing. This is so hard for my babies, but I made a breakthrough last week! Of course I had modeled what to write and how to use transition words, but I wrote exactly what the kids told me to write (no making sense of it, just taking dictation). The next day, I read each sentence aloud, one by one. After the first one, one of my smarties said, "That's NOT a sentence!" Ding, ding, ding!!! It hit everyone that there was no subject and that the phrase didn't make sense on its own. After so many lessons on rereading your own writing, I don't know what made it hit home, except that maybe, because we wrote it together, and reread it on another day, the kids didn't see it as they meant it, but exactly as they had written it. Awesome! Now we really get the value of rereading.

In math, we're spending the week on analyzing and solving word problems. It's time, now that my littles can read and comprehend on grade level, that we tackle the beast head on! A few years ago, I bought Hope King's PSA Approach to Problem Solving. Later, she and I met and I wrote a teeny-tiny sister product, PSA Froggy Problems, with her permission. I'll be using both this week to show the kids how to get through the words to the math, choose an operation, find the important information, solve the problems, and check for accuracy.

Other than our winter MAP testing, that's our week. Hope yours is wonderful!

XOXO,

Brooke