Winter Fun! Week 1

Last week, we returned from a fun and fabulous winter break and jumped right into our winter theme. We'll be focusing on "Winter" for about 3 weeks. Here's a brief run down on what we did last week!

We introduced our winter vocabulary. All throughout the theme, we have pictures of our vocabulary words, along with the written word, up on our main bulletin board.These are the same pictures that are sent home with families for practice at home. Our winter words include snowman, snowflake, hat, ice skates, scarf, mittens, boots and jacket. Hot cocoa, penguin and cold are some other fun words to talk about!

I try to have a lot of fun activities that we do when we are really focusing on teaching vocabulary. One way I try to bombard the students with vocabulary during this theme is by having them "feed" the pictures to our well-loved, yet hungry, penguin.Students take turns (I want my turn) picking a picture and labeling it. We also talk about the object--for example "where do you put a hat?" "on your head!" *high five* Then, the child feeds the penguin (and gets to practice the sentence "he is eating!").

Our penguin friend also got a chance to eat when we fed him snowmen with articulation cards on them so students could practice their /s/ sound (SSSnowman) and saying Consonant-Vowel-Consonant (CVC) words like cat, bat or boat.

This is what our library looks like:We have several books about winter for our students to read!

For each theme, we also incorporate math activities. As the students learn pre-math skills, they are also continuing to focus on the new vocabulary words. The also have to request everything they want!
We had one activity that focused on size concepts of big, bigger and biggest.
Students sorted according to snowball size and talked about the sizes. Did ya notice that a snowman has a big snowball, then a bigger one and the biggest at the bottom?
Students also made a counting book counting buttons they put on their snowman.

We use the concept of Touch Math to reinforce counting.

There are so many more activities for us to do! I'll fill you in on some more activities as the weeks move on. Until then, I hope you enjoyed your Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday. It's a wet week in Southern California, so stay dry!