Something to Shout About!

This week we're our phonemic awareness skill are "ou" and "ow".  Here are a few cute ideas that my class has enjoyed so far.  The book in the picture above is full of short poems which are perfect for primary learners.  They're short, funny, and have fabulous illustrations.  Today we talked about how April is national poetry month, and we promised to read at least one great poem every single day for the rest of the year.

Here's a copy of our poem of the week.

my cow_poem

I love this book because it is so comprehensive.  It has word families, consonant blends, digraphs, vowel combinations, prefixes and suffixes, and short skill assessments.  This week we're making the "ouch" and "own" books.  This is also a great tool for students because they store them in a ziploc bag inside their book boxes.  They can study their weekly spelling words and get accurate spellings for words that they're not sure about.  

I also love this book because it has so many open ended word sorts.  There are lots of ways to use this book with students of all levels.  I can adjust the parameters of the sort for my students depending on their phonemic awareness strengths and reading abilities.  My higher students like to use these as a word challenge to see how many different ways the words can be sorted.

On Monday we made these sunflowers and brainstormed lots of  "ow" words.  

We also read this book to learn more about the life cycle of  asunflower.  

Today we focused more on "ou."  We read "Arthur's Boo Boo's," and then each student completed a 

text-to-self connection about an injury or "owie" that they've had.  Most of the students are still working on theirs, but here is an example.  

I think they look so dang cute, and I guess I never really knew how much a neon colored band-aid could put a smile on a little one's face!

We're working on measurement in math right now so we got those sunflowers out again.  Each student's flower was just a little different.  They all had different lengths for their stem, petals, and leaves.  They measured their flowers and other items from around the room using snap cubes.  

We also painted these flowers for more measurement practice tomorrow.  We'll use paper clips, bear counters, snap cubes, color tiles, and crayons to measure these tomorrow.  

 

It's amazing how much six and seven year olds love to paint!

Tomorrow we're having a "sour" taste test with sour jelly beans, sour straws, and pickles. We'll graph the and analyze our results.  I can't wait to snap pictures of those cute little "sour" faces!