Sunday, November 3, 2013

Leaves and Literacy


 We have been doing a lot of leaf investigations in our class!  The children have been really interested in the changing leaves ever since the trees on our playground started to turn color.  And who could blame with beautiful leaves like this?


           

We decided to learn what kind of trees we have on our playground and in front of the school.  We discussed how we could learn this... through books!  We had lots of books in our classroom library that we used to do some research.  We also used the internet!  

After we learned what kind of trees we have, we decided to make a book!  We went to each tree and chose a leaf and took a picture.  We then worked together to write a book about the trees!  It is now finished and we plan on sharing it with other classes!  We did a great job!

We also have loved playing in the leaves outside!


 
 

 


We also have enjoyed inspecting the insects we have found outside, too!


Of course, it isn't all play!  We each chose a favorite leaf and then sorted and graphed them by color!


We have also made our own leaves and written about our favorite leaves!  

In addition to the leaf learning we have been doing, we also have been working on literacy!  Here are some of the literacy stations we have been working on...


This is a Pete the Cat syllable sort!  We counted the syllables in different items in Pete the Cat book and then graphed them by the number of syllables!


In this literacy station, we worked on spelling the color words.  We are getting really good with those!


With this station, the children matched letters to pictures starting with that sound.  They then traced and wrote the letters in ABC order.

 

This station involved determining the beginning sound of the pictures and then place the correct letter in that box.  There were color word pages, too!  The children spelled the color words with the letter beads.


This station asks the children to dump the letters and then put them in ABC order!  They then fill in the blanks on an ABC order page.  This helps with letter writing practice as well as letter identification.



The girls in this station are working on putting puzzles together.  They are matching the upper and lower case letters!


This is our name center!  They are working on sorting the names of the people in our class by the number of letters they have in their names!  It's amazing how quickly they learn to read the names of their friends!

We are ready to begin new math and literacy stations this week!  We are also beginning to learn about pumpkins!  We can't wait to carve them and see what's inside!