Week 9

Wellll this week we entered into the unit of 3D shapes! Super fun! On Monday, my mentor teacher introduced each shape with a block and named it. We are focused on cube, rectangular prism, triangular prism, sphere, cylinder, and cone. On Monday, children explore the shape blocks and built with them. It was nice to just give them some investigation time to work with the shapes. We also had a weekly poem this week about shapes:

3D shapes are fat not flat
A cone is like a party hat
A sphere is like a bouncy ball
A prism is like a building tall
A cylinder is like a can of pop
A cone is like the dice you drop
3D shapes are here and there
3D shapes are everywhere!

On Friday the children attempted to make the different shapes out of playdough which was kind of a challenge, but fun. Some other math fun happened on St. Patrick's Day with graphing Lucky Charm marshmallows!

In writing, we have been doing persuasive pieces. They write letters to their mom or dad to ask for something like a new toy, but they need to also put down a reason or two that they should get it. One child wrote about how he wanted more options in his lunch box and he compromised by saying he would pack his own snack if he could have more choices for lunch. They get pretty creative. In literacy, I led a couple small groups working on word families. I also am starting to focus on some sight words with one boy and I created a system of flies with sight words on them that he can hit with a fly swatter :) He's quite behind in his sight word count so I wanted to make more of an effort to work with him. I tell him to find a word and he has to swat it! It's a fun game for someone who needs more interactive instruction. So far we are just focusing on some 2 letter words that we can practice vowel sounds with like it, if, in, be, me, he, etc.

This week I also experienced quite the tantrum from one of the little girls. Let's call her Princess. Her reading buddy partner came up to me to tell me something Princess was doing that wasn't appropriate and I had already noticed that Princess was not really doing her task. So I asked her, "What's your job right now?" to which she crossed her arms and in a mad voice said, "Nothing." I said, "Excuse me?" and then she got even madder and louder and yelled, "NOTHING!" So I immediately stood up and went to go talk to her, but she kept turning her body away from me and saying things like, "NO! I don't want to talk." So then I had to move her and have her partner pair with someone else. Princess would not stand up and move even after I told her she needed to so I moved her chair with her in it over to another table. Then she proceeded to cry and fit and I told her she could come over to me when she was ready to talk. My mentor teacher caught my eye across the room and was smirking because this was a child she had told me had fits in the beginning of the year and she wanted me to experience it at least once. So now I have. But it is so funny/interesting how children can escalate so fast from absolutely nothing. She was having a bad day to be fair, but it was some good experience for me to deal with the situation. I talked to her before the next transition and told her what I saw and how I felt and my mentor teacher asked her, "Do you think you made the problem bigger or smaller?" Gotta love social-emotional development.

I'm still working one on one with the child I am following who still doesn't have all of her letters. Marisa. We work with the penguin still, but I have also tried to bring in some other artsy ways of learning letters. I "wrote" letters on white paper with white Elmer's glue and let it dry. Then Marisa was able to put a sheet over the letter and shade with a crayon to "reveal" the letter! This allowed me to then ask her about letters one at a time. She loves to do artsy things like this. On Friday, I wrote letters out with white crayon and then had her water color to "reveal" them again. This wasn't as successful because I think there were too many letters per one page for her to focus on (She may have dyslexia as we found out her father is diagnosed with it). I'm glad that she was able to do some more crafty things and still get some good one on one letter instruction. She is still having a really hard time to remember that G does not make the same sound that J makes. I need some ideas for that one. Also she says H makes the "ch" sound and L makes the short e sound. The names of some letters just don't match the sounds so it's confusing for some kiddos.