Weekly Round-Up: November 26

Hi friends! I’m back to share some photos of what we have been up to in our classroom this week!
1. SENTENCE JENGA
I have a high group of kiddos this year where most of my kids know all of their letters and sounds (even the JKs) and are working on sight words and reading sentences.  So I decided to try this centre out to challenge the students who needed more than letter work! 
Students are invited to make a sentence with the jenga blocks and record their sentences on the whiteboard.  They are also encouraged to draw a picture to match and to show their comprehension.  I got the jenga blocks from Dollarama and wrote the words on them with flair pens.
2. COLOUR WORD PLAY DOUGH MATS

My kiddos love play dough so I’m always trying to switch up the mats and invitations at the play dough centre to keep it fresh! This week we used these colour word mats to practice building colour words and reading simple sentences.
You can find my colour word play dough mats by clicking here or on the image below:
3. FARM ANIMAL INQUIRY

During our trip to the pumpkin farm, one of my students asked “Do cows have any predators?”  I loved this question so when we got back to our classroom I shared his question with the kids and asked if anyone else had any questions about something they saw at the farm.  The kids came up with so many good questions! So we delved into our first full inquiry project!
First we sorted the questions into categories (pig questions, sheep questions, chicken questions etc.) and started our research!

We learned what pigs eat and what eats pigs:
(We did a t-chart as a class and I had students volunteer to come record one new learning on a index card.)
We learned if horses have good eyes or not, what they eat and if they have predators:

We learned that chickens are birds but they do not fly:

And we learned what sheep eat:

We used books, websites and videos to research answers to our questions.  I realized we forgot to record the answer to our original question “Do cows have predators” now that I’m looking over the board more carefully but we did talk abut it and read an excerpt from a website about it!
I had lots of people on Instagram ask if I could share this inquiry research writing template.  I’ve uploaded it to my TPT store.  You can click here or on the image below to check it out:
4. FARM SMALL WORLD PLAY

During our farm inquiry, I also set up this farm small world play centre for the students to create a farm story and to show what they know about farms.  Students loved this centre and loved making farm stories here!
One of my girls even wanted to record her farm story in writing! She worked so hard on it so we decided to put it up on our inquiry board!
5. WONDER WALL

I’m currently participating in a book club for the book “The Curious Classroom” by Harvey Daniels.  In our board, if you attend the book club (usually 2 sessions after school) you get the book for free! I’ve been wanting to check this book out for a while so I jumped on it as soon as registration opened! It has a lot of practical tips for teachers who want to do inquiry based learning in all grades! I highly recommend it for K teachers but 1-8 teachers as well!
Anyway, our homework for the first book club was to try one activity from Chapter 3 and bring back how it went to the second book club.  I’ve always made wonder charts with the students whole group when wonders were not coming up authentically through play and day to day conversations, but never released the work entirely to the kids.  With this wonder chart, students can grab a post it note anytime (during centre time) and write what they are wondering about! Of course the JK’s will still need help, and some are not writing questions (I have one girl who keeps just writing her name and sticking it up there… lol) but I will scribe for them or I have one of my stronger SK students scribe for them if I’m busy running a guided group.  So far they have loved the ownership and new questions are popping up everyday!  I’m looking forward to finishing the book soon and trying more activities from this book!
6. CYBER SALE + A GIVEAWAY

While I’m here, I just wanted to share that I’m doing a super quick giveaway on my Instagram page.  You can enter for a chance to win a $10 TPT gift card and an item of your choice from my TPT store, just in time for the TPT cyber sale happening this Monday and Tuesday!
Click here or on the image above to read details on how to enter!
That’s it from me this week!
I hope you are having a great Sunday!
– Yukari

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