Valentine's Fun

We celebrated the 100th day!

As you may know I was gone during the fun festivities on Valentine's Day.  My family took a quick trip to Disney World.  When I booked it, I completely forgot about the program!  I had my amazing sub (Diane Smith) take some pictures.  Nolan broke my classroom camera so they are a little fuzzy.  I am going to have to start bringing my nice camera to school I guess!  

Kendra (Major's mom) came and read to our class this week for I love to Read Month.  On Tuesday we have a cartoonist coming to our school.  If you would like to come and read to our class, please let me know!  Even in March, April, or May.  They really enjoy this.   In reading we have been really working on the magic e and long vowel combinations (ai/ay and ea/ee this week).  Some students are beginning to confuse their short vowels with their long vowels.  Here is a quick youtube video to watch that will help:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHO1aJyxWIE

You may know this already but I recently learned this fact: You can make your own YouTube station that bookmarks videos for you.  This is a very useful tool if your child wants to watch things on youtube but you are not sure if they are appropriate.  Bookmark the videos that I give you and they will probably watch them because they really like them when we do them in class!  

I am going to start using sensory boxes to help with our word work time.  This week I am making some moon sand and putting shells in it.  Then the kids have to sort short and long e sounds with our parent volunteers.  The kids really like hands on learning.  I found the recipe on pinterest and thought some of you may be interested:  http://www.growingajeweledrose.com/2013/01/cloud-dough-recipes.html.  Take a bucket and fill it with the moon sand.  Write words on rocks (or math problems) and have them sort them or spell them or you can just make it for fun if you would like too!  My kids LOVED it!  We had to try it out tonight of course!  

Lastly, if you go on ixl.com at home (remember 20 minutes a day improves test scores by 20%) the category that I would practice next is graphing (bar graphs, picture graphs, and tally graphs are our focus).  We are finishing up measurement this week.  Have a good week!