Hello and welcome back! We hope you all had a wonderful holiday! In ELA this term we will move from phonics to story elements, reading strategies, and writing. This week and next students will be learning about characters, setting, and plot. We have watched Brain Pop jr. about each of these story elements and have completed or will complete a variety of activities for these elements. Below are the anchor charts we use in class to explain the elements.
Author Archives: shannaalbert
Hour of Code
Recently our students participated in the Hour of Code challenge. The challenge is aimed to introduce students to computer programming. Mr. Fran came into our classroom and taught the students how to use the “Bee Bot” app. Students had to program the “Bee Bot” by telling it where to go. Our classes really enjoyed the activity. After the holiday, we will introduce the “Bee Bot” robots to our students to continue developing our coding skills. For more information on the Hour of Code, please visit the following link http://www.qatar.blogsek.es/.
We’ve Got Attitude!
Last week students celebrated our achievement of moving the mystery box from the ceiling to the teacher’s desk. In order to move the mystery box, students needed to demonstrate our key attitudes of commitment, empathy, and appreciation. Each time students showed these or caught one another showing these attitudes, our box moved down. The Lion class celebrated with a “Planes” party while the Tiger class had a pirate theme party. Students greatly enjoyed the opportunity to celebrate their good attitudes. Below are pictures from our parties. Great work preschool 5!
Kelso’s Wheel…as Demonstrated by Preschool 5
This week students were given the challenge of creating their own display to show Kelso’s Choices. We have discussed and participated in small role plays for all of the different Kelso Wheel Choices. On Tuesday, students used their knowledge to create their own wheel. Each group chose a strategy such as walking away or talking it out. The groups decided how to show the choice through a picture. Our pictures were then displayed in the main hall to help all students remember the problem solving strategies. Try to guess which choice each group is demonstrating. Feel free to post your answers as a comment.
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Week of November 2nd
We had another exciting week in preschool 5. Students learned more vowel teams including oa, ie, and ee. We also learned the sounds for z and j. Students were excited to use our “hot spot” games and the iPads during listening centers. We practiced our tricky words by writing them with letter magnets and sorted objects by their beginning sounds. In math we continued practicing telling time to the hour and half hour. Students learned our new learner profiles for the unit. We are focusing on being open-minded, balanced, and caring. Thank you for viewing our post, please write a comment about something you learned this week or your favorite part of the week.
Tricky Words
Tricky words are frequently used words that are difficult to sound out or spell phonetically (using the sounds). We describe them as words that do not follow the rules. As these words are used often, it is important for students to be able to read and write these words automatically. Tricky words are also called sight words depending on the curriculum that is followed. As we use Jolly Phonics, we will refer to them as tricky words. Currently we are working on the following words:
She, do, are, he, the, was, all, we, me, to, and be. Please practice reading and writing these words at home.
These links have wonderful online games that students can play to practice a variety of tricky words (the words included in the games go beyond what we are currently practicing in class):
http://www.familylearning.org.uk/sight_word_games.html
http://www.iboard.co.uk/activity/Phase-2-Tricky-Words-Bus-747
Conflict Resolution
When students have conflicts with others during the day, we highly encourage them to try and solve the problem on their own. During our friendship unit we will spend a great deal of time teaching students different strategies for solving their problems. We use Kelso’s Choices to show students these strategies. We will introduce a few of these strategies such as counting to ten or walking away during our first unit so that they are already able to solve problems. Please help to reinforce the strategies at home as well. For more information please visit
Reflection
We had a great week as we launched our first unit all about communities! We are looking forward to posting photos of the students as soon as all photo permission slips are turned in. For now, we would like to share with you one of our methods for reflecting on our learning. At the end of lessons, we will ask students to either move their clip or turn their card to show how they feel the assignment went. If students choose green, they think the assignment is easy and they can complete it independently. If students choose yellow, it means they need to slow down a bit or have some assistance for the assignment. If students choose red, it lets us know that they found the assignment difficult and we may need to reteach the concepts. This method allows students to reflect on their learning and gives a visual to see how our attitudes change the more we practice skills and concepts. The charts can be seen in the following pictures.
Thank you to everyone who wrote comments about their week! We always look forward to reading them!
Welcome to Preschool 5
We had a wonderful first week of class. Students had the opportunity to get to know their classmates as well as their way around school. We played a variety of games and completed team building activities to get our classroom community off to a strong start. Students also listened and responded to many stories in class. We introduced our IB learner profiles of principled and inquirer as well as our attitude of curiosity. Below you see pictures of our mystery box as well as the profile behavior chart. When students demonstrate the attitudes of curiosity, confidence, and creativity, the box moves closer to the desk. Once the box reaches the desk, students earn the prize inside. Our behavior chart is used in the classroom. When students are doing well, their pin goes up. When students need to make better choices, the pin moves down. Students start in the middle of the chart everyday and are able to move up and down throughout the day depending on their choices.
Please write a comment about your first week on this post. We look forward to reading your reflections. Finally, if you are new to our school, please be sure to sign the photo permission slips so we can update the photos on our blog. The slips were sent home today.
Graduation
Thank you for joining us for our graduation celebration last week! The students really enjoyed the event. Below you will find pictures of the night. A special thank you to Raviv and Mr. Fran who took some great photos for us!