Sunday, February 1, 2015

Continuing Our Sports Exploration & Groundhog Day

We had a very busy week! Like I posted last week, we finished our alphabet wall. Here are a few pictures of the completed wall. It turned out awesome! 
We have continued to work on the exploration stage of our sports study. This week we have watched videos of the following sports: cricket, curling, track and field events such as running events, throwing events, jumping events, figure skating, and gymnastics. We also watched an Olympic medal ceremony where Charlie White and Meryl Davis received the gold medals. We talked about what each of the medals meant. I showed them pictures of different gold, silver, and bronze from different Olympic Ceremonies.

We have only watched videos of a few of the different gymnastic events so we will continue to watch more next week. After watching the videos, the students then document their observations in their exploration journals. The girls in our class have really enjoyed watching the figure skating videos as you can see through these documentations of figure skaters holding their leg up and spinning around.
I really love this documentation of a track star jumping over the hurdles! They did a great job by showing the legs on either side of the hurdle to represent them jumping over the hurdle.
Using moon dough to make different sized sports balls and compare the sizes to discuss which one is smaller, medium or larger.
Continuing to explore sports equipment in the "Look Closer" area.


On Friday we watched a Sesame Street movie called, "Count on Sports". It showed how to incorporate math with sports. Ernie sorted the sports balls into different piles by size.
Grover and The Count were discussing some of the rules and playing golf. They were counting how many strokes they hit on each turn.
Grover and a basketball player were discussing tall and short. The Count was counting how many race cars zoomed by him.
After the movie, the students documented their favorite parts. Most of the students drew Elmo playing tennis as their favorite part. I am very happy with how the students are sounding out words, using two finger spaces in between words, using our word wall to spell sight words correctly, and using periods at the end of their sentences. 
After lunch we always read chapter books as a class. We just finished the Hardy Boys mystery book, "Sports Sabotage". We figured out who messed up the equipment shed in order to sabotage field day. We have now started the Rainbow Magic Sports Fairies series. The first book in this series is "Helena and the Horse-Riding Fairy". The students were excited to start this story and see what happens!
We read this "Helmet Colors" story and then colored each page appropriately.

This book allowed us to practiced guided reading, pointing to the words as we read, and reading our color words.




Each month we practice writing our name on this page in our portfolios. This helps to show the kids progress each month and how they grow in writing their name. We are now working on writing our last names and using neat handwriting. 
We discussed how Monday was groundhog day. I made a graph to ask the students, "Do You Think the Groundhog Will See His Shadow?". We talked about what it meant if the groundhog did or did not see his shadow. 

Each student made their prediction and signed their name under either "Yes" or "No".

As you can see, "No" won. We are all hopeful that spring is coming soon! We will see on Monday whether or not the groundhog sees his shadow.

We finished our pink mosaic.

We worked really hard to finish our white mosaic as well! This was our last color mosaic and I told the kids that I had a surprise for the art area that I would bring in when they finished them all. Stay tuned for the reveal on the next blog post!





Now that we have finished our alphabet wall, we have begun talking about hunks and chunks. The first chunk we focused on was "TH". They came up with great words that have th in them and their illustrations were fantastic! 
The 100th day is right around the corner and it will be here before you know it! We are making a bulletin board with a few other classes with 100 reasons why we love school. Here are a few of the reasons why they love school! I can't wait to see what the other classes come up with as well as the bulletin board when it is completed!
Thanks for checking in, have a great week!

Mrs. Brittany Garrabrant

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