jungle week 2: SNAKES


This week of learning and discoverying has been incredible. I'm sooo proud of these little ones:

We started by talking about snakes and discussing what they can do, what they have and how they are. Our students use of the language has increased a lot because they felt very comfortable with the structures.


after doing this in the big poster we completed a worksheet by glueing pictures. (no letters allowed hehe)

we learned about curves through snakes bodies and symmetries:


 we used our crafts to decorate the class jungle.

                                     we love coloring jungles at the computers room:


our main and most important work this week had to do with literacy:
we did "the aligator chomp" syllable sort activity by Deanna  Jump:

we also play a game where we had to take a jungle animal beginning with a specific sound from a cauldron.

we did two writing activities for the first time and the results were incredible:

The first one was a shared writing activity were we completed blanks on a text about snakes. The helper was doing it on a big paper on the board while the rest were doing it on their own papers and i was helping writing the sounds and words on the board.



ARENT THEY BRILLIANT? I'M SO PROUD!!!

We wanted them to discover the practice of free writing, because they think they can't write until they know how. The intention of this activity, as the intention of any free writing activity, is for the kids to write whatever they want about snakes, in this case, and everything they do is correct because we are, first of all practicing and second of all because we are evaluating fluency not efficiency, and of course free writing can happen wherever you feel confortable ( on the floor, at the table... )


We were expecting lines and circles, or letters with no relation and maybe some words.
This is what we got:
our english as a second language kids writing:
I'M THRILLED TO SEE THIS:


Next week is monkeys' week, carnival on friday and home for a week for our carnival holidays!!

WE LOVE MONKEYING AROUND IN 4 YEARS OLD. week 1

 

So finally the jungle project is taking form. The kiddos are incredibly motivated and we are learning lots of things.

What to do first?? TURN THE CLASS INTO A JUNGLE!

CAN YOU SEE EXPLORER PETE?
THE CRUISE IS STILL UNDER CONSTRUCTION THE SAME AS THE PALM TREES
can you see our great snake? we borrowed it from one of the school teachers' kids.
a closer look

THESE ARE SOME OF THE JUNGLE RELATED THINGS THE KIDS BROUGH TO SCHOOL HELP US WORK ON THE PROJECT.   

 






we started the project by watching "the jungle book" eating popcorn. The kids earned their popcorn party because they used their english a lot in class.
We took a look at a map and a globe to see how far the jungles are from our town. We also checked some interesting places on the map such as countries some kids or their parents come from, places they have been in Spain...


we played and explored the different materials the kids brought and talk about lots of animals.

We started by saying things we know about the jungle and its animals:


one of the kids brought a snake and we checked if it was longer or shorter than the one Sara lend us.

After watching the jungle book we were very curious about why kaa was "hugging Mowgli"
so we learned that boa constrictors strangle their preys and then eat them whole.
We are so impress that now we "hug" all our our stuffed animals:



take a look at the books we are loving this week:
 


 

FAMILY FUN AND SOME SEGMENTING GAMES

These past weeks we have been pretty busy talking about our families and houses.

We made these lovely houses with our families:



and we completed our family books from Jessica Sibucao fabulous bundle:


from her bundle are also these math centers where kids have to complete the sequences:


we are getting pretty good at our building words center:



SEGMENTING GAMES:
my 4 year olds are getting incredibly well at segmenting words orally, most of them are able to say cvc words or ccvc words sound by sound which makes me amazingly proud of this little learners. we have been doing the segmenting by rollercoasting the sounds, jumping hoops, sorting cups and cutting letters to build words.

 1. rollercoasting sounds:
I love heidi songs idea of teaching medial sounds so we use it in all of our segmenting activities.

The girl chose one word from the board and "rollercoastered" it. she was saying  /mmmm/   / ouuuuu/  /sssssss/

2. segmenting with hoops:
we wanted to add more movement to our learning so the best way was adding hoops.

in the firt picture I said a word and each kid made one of the sounds ie. CAT /C/ in the blue hoop, /A/ in the yellow, and /T/ in the red one.
after working with three kids at a time it works great to me moving on to only one kid jumping the three sounds.
here the boy chose a word and was jumping his sounds / F/  / I/  /SH/
As you can see there are no letters in our work so far. AS we are working on phonological awareness we don't need to use letters. But as they were very interested in this activities we turned this learning into a literacy writing paper:

We had some pictures with elkoning boxes below we have to figure out the beginning, middle and ending sounds, right after we cut out the letter sounds and paste them to later on color beginning sound blue, middle sound yellow and ending sound red.

we have also been playing with cups changing the beginning sound to build different words.


The following weeks we will start working more on ending sounds. Let's see how it goes.

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