Island Fun

Our theme for the week was Island Fun.  We read "Chicka, Chicka, Boom! Boom!" and focused on letter recognition and matching upper and lower case letters.  In class, we used a game from the website www.abcya.com to help us match upper and lower case letters.  To play this game, students are given a picture that is black and white and it needs some color!  Every time you match the correct capital and lowercase letter, color is added to your picture.  When all of the letters are matched, your picture is bursting with different colors!  We had the opportunity to play this game as a whole class and it was available for students to play during center time.  Below is a picture of two students getting started on the game.

Another center that was opened this week was the Discovery Table center.  Students had to "fish" for foam letters with their nets.  They could stick their letters on the walls of the discovery table to try to spell words and their names.

Here is a picture of students making the alphabet with their foam letters!

During our Island Fun theme, we also talked about what an island is and we incorporated things related to islands in our Finger Power center.  On an island, you may find seashells and even see a jellyfish!  Students chose to start with either a jellyfish paper or a seashell paper.  They had to cut out each picture and to work on finger strength, they used a hole puncher to put holes around the edges of the jellyfish or seashell.  Then, they used red string and had to thread the string in and out of the holes.  This is a great activity for fine motor skills.  Finally, students could tie the string together and they could color in their jellyfish and seashells.  Here are pictures of students working hard at the Finger Power center!

Here are pictures of the finished product!

Way to go!  They are so proud of their hard work!

One day to warm up our brains for math, we played an interactive Math Bingo game (which also came from www.abcya.com).  The computer called out a number and students had to identify the number and click on it.  You can set your game to the level of your choice.  We played with numbers from 1-24.  

To add some more movement into our day, we have watched a video of the Alphabet Song and we do cross-crawls (right elbow to left knee, left elbow to right knee) every time we say a letter.  When he hear the letter of the day, we clap.  We also do this for our letter sounds.  This movement is good for our brains and can help some students recall information easier.

Our project this week was making a Chicka, Chicka, Boom! Boom! tree.  We read the book, "Chicka, Chicka, Boom! Boom!" and made our own trees and spelled our names going up them.  This project incorporated math as well as literacy.  The students were each given one large yellow rectangle piece of paper, several brown squares, four green rectangles, green triangles, and four brown circles.

As we put together our trees, we stopped and studied each shape.  I asked the students to identify their shapes and we talked as a whole class about how they are different (for example, "How is a triangle different from a rectangle or a circle?"  We also counted how many of each shape that we had.  Below are pictures of students working on putting all of their shapes together to make their trees.

 After students made their coconut trees out of their different shapes, we talked about how many letters are in our names.  Students were given a poem to place on the bottom of their trees.  It said, "Chicka, Chicka, Boom! Boom!  Will there be enough room?  ______________________ has __________ letters in his/her name."  They had to write their names on the first blank line and then count how many numbers are in their names and write that on the second line.  Finally, everyone was given foam letter stickers.  Students had to spell their names climbing up the coconut trees.  The projects turned out great!