Devon completed Fast Forward. The last remaining 20 minutes, Devon practiced another genre of writing for her Children's Hosptital project; adventure story. She was able to complete the character and setting portion of her graphic organizer. She seemed very motivated and was a self starter today.
Devon completed the next session of Fast Forward. The last remaining 20 minutes, we practiced another genre of writing to go with her sewing project for the Children's Hospital. She chose her cat as the focus and she brainstormed and wrote a list of adjectives to describe the "Adjective Cat." (Colorful, creative, cute, cuddly, etc.) The assignment was to recall previous adjectives she uses regularly as well as an introduction to adjectives she's heard of but doesn't regularly apply by hunting through the dictionary under only the "C" section to look for other adjectives. This would've given her practice with first determining the part of speech each word was, as well as reading the definitions to the adjectives to decide if they were applicable to the cat or not. She refused to do that and said she didn't want "hard" words but easy ones that any young kid could understand.
We listened to the next section of the song, "50 States that Rhyme." Maya identified the names of the states in the song and we stopped to chart them on chart paper. She then used a pointer, to go back and read the states to the words of the song as it played.
Maya learned to skip count quarters to a dollar. We say the jingle, "25, 50, 75, a dollar!" As Maya sang, I laid down a quarter for each step. Then, I'd only lay down two quarters and stop so she would have to know to stop at 50; practicing skip counting 25, 50 for just two quarters. I did this for one, three and four quarters as well. I laid random groups of coins down (including quarters) for Maya to count. She identified the largest to least valued coins each time and practiced counting from there. This has been the most challenging coin for her to include by far. We will continue to review.
"Maya played the application, "Counting Money." Various coins were grouped together and she had to identify the largest valued coin (Half Dollar) and skip count from there to quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies. She is very successful with counting from a half dollar on as it ends with a good even number like 50. She can count right into the tens, fives, or ones from there. It's still challenging for her to count on twenty five from there but at times she can.
Maya re-read Bunnies in the Garden to practice reading fluently. Because she was familiar with the story, she was able to thoroughly summarize it and include additional details this time that she didn't include last time. She wrote a diary entry in her new diary about the day she and Yanuel made dreidels. She independently included the ordinal number (17th) and the comma in the date which she was very proud of! She wrote 4 complete sentences on topic. Two of her sentences included 3 or more nouns (Yanuel, Miss Heidi, Miss Kerianne; marshmellos, pretzels, hershey kisses, etc.) which was a great authentic application to what she learned the previous day. She successfully separated all four of the names with commas indicating that she retained the new skill. However, she put a comma between marsh, mellow, and hershey, kisses in her next sentence instead of grouping the two individual words as one. She self corrected her mistake with prompting.
Text to self/world Connections, Commas in a series
Lesson Outline
Maya and I alternated reading 3 chapters of Henry and Mudge; Sick Day, Cold Chills, The Vet. As we read, we made text to self connections about our dog being at the vet; just like Mudge. We also made a text to world connection as we made inferences about other dogs in the community. We wrote these on sticky notes and charted them on our connections poster. The characters in Henry and Mudge spoke many sentences that contained three or more nouns which modeled commas in a series. Following reading Maya practiced incorporating commas in sentences that contain three or more nouns. I re-wrote many the sentences we found in the book on her new table top easel and she used dry erase markers to insert the commas where they belong. Although we've practiced this skill before, it took a couple examples of modeling for her to recall how to know where to apply them. She then came up with and wrote her own sentences that contained three or more nouns and I had to decide where the commas went which she loved :)
