Today our radiator was making lots of pounding noises. This led to a discussion about elves building a secret spy hole to watch how well we are listening ("And we have to sit quietly because if we disturb them they can't work"--one student). The elves will be here all month, so you might hear talk about this : )
Today during intervention time we talked more about shapes. The children looked around the room and found a variety of shapes: circles, squares, rectangles, etc. Then we worked to build language by describing how we knew it was that type of shape. Geometric and spatial concepts will continue to be woven into many activities in this unit. We did our daily math and counted to our target number, 55, by 1's, 5's, and 10's. We did great!! (Counting by 5's and 10's does not yet have to be independent). Then we reviewed the sight word he and talked about word families -ap, -an, and -at. We worked to make the connection that words in word families are also rhyming words (Ex. -ap family--tap,map,nap, etc). At this level it is okay if the children are making up words when they are rhyming.
Mrs. Mary read us a book about reindeer. We talked about how reindeer are different from deer. Then we got to work with new stations. The stations included word building work, the number 8 handwriting practice, a "(Student) can...." writing, book making, and a free-lance reindeer craft (I say free lance because there were no requirements of how their reindeer were to look; they were given a large piece of paper and had at it :):) Wait till you see how creative they were!!)
Time got away from us and it was quickly the end of our morning.
With the start of our December crafts and talking about reindeer and elves, I think I might have confused some children as one said to me at the end of the day, "Miss Voigts, Is it Christmas tomorrow?" :)