As I haven't finished the current unit of work I am working on at the moment (People who help us) I will write this week about something I do every week regardless of the theme... letter formation stations!
Before I tell you about the different stations I have going during writing time, here is a really good interactive letter tracing resource I use to launch lessons along with letter formation rhymes and stories:
For about 5-10 minutes of the letter formation lesson I usually get them to practice writing the letters on their whiteboards and attempt to get rid of bad formation habits before I let them off on their own making letters.
Station 1: Making letters out of playdough. (Here's the recipe I used to make mine: Playdoh Recipe)
Station 2: Continue practicing letter formation on whiteboards.
Station 3: Repeated practice of letters in sand boxes (old perfume gift boxes filled with a thin layer of sand). Shake the box when they run out of space and start again.
Station 4: I give them A5 sheets of paper with the letter printed on them about 6 times.They must cover the letters with glue, cut some pieces of wool up and stick them on to cover the shapes of the letters.
Station 5: Formation of letters on blackboards with chalk or on lined paper taking note of tall, small and fall letters as they write them. Usually consists of a front page of letters (capital and lower case versions of the letter being studied) and a back page of words starting with the letter (e.g Ryan the rabbit).
Possible Station 6 idea: I also like the idea featured on this website: All About Learning Press where a Ziploc bag is filled with soap and taped to the table and then the letters are traced on the bag. I tried making this but have not tried it out in the classroom as of yet!
Children are moved around stations after roughly 5 minutes at a station. They continue the work of the child who has left the seat empty in the case of the writing on lined paper exercise and the sticking wool onto the letters exercise.
Water as a theme offers lots of opportunities for learning - here are some of the lessons I taught based around water last week!
1) Geography/Science/Environmental Awareness and Care: Water Collages
We talked about why water is important and whether we could live without it. I then got them to come up with ways people use water. The children who answered correctly chose the picture on the table that best suited their answers and stuck it on the chart until all pictures were used. The following day I posed the question of whether it was only people who need water to live. We discussed where we might find fish in the town I am teaching in - whether there is a sea, river or lake nearby. Following the discussion of the differences between these, we identified our local river and nearby lakes. They suggested animals that live on a river or a lake. They chose the correct picture from the hidden table and stuck it on another chart.
We then talked about how litter affects people and creatures living in the lakes and rivers and how we could stop them littering these. We decided to create posters/signs to leave by the river to encourage people to stop littering. We talked about what pictures they could include and what words they would need to use. We then mounted these around a large river chart on the wall outside the classroom. (Lesson idea derived from Greenschools website lesson plans).
2) Science: Floating and Sinking
We identified the terminology of floating and sinking and we talked about objects they felt would sink and which would float. We tested various objects in pairs, estimating and giving reasons for their choice first and then marking this in in crayon on the worksheet. We then tested it and talked about why it floated or sank based on weight, materials, etc (Floating objects were identified as being light, made of wood or being filled with air for example). We marked the answer in in pencil. We checked out the BBC website for a revision concluding activity. http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/digger/5_7entry/8.shtml
3) Music: The Little Mermaid We listened to the Little Mermaid songs 'Under the Sea' and 'Part of Your World' and discussed whether the songs were happy or sad and why. We picked suitable actions to match the sad/happy quality of the music and used these to respond to the music through movement.
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4) Maths: Capacity
Compared various sized containers and whether they would hold more or less water than each other. Tested it out by filling one container from another.
We estimated and then tested out how many egg cups or spoons of water (and sand) would fill the containers.
We chose which method of measuring we would use: cups or spoons depending on the size of the container.
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5) Gaeilge: An Aimsir
We described the weather every morning. We learned actions to accompany the weather elements (ag cur báiste, an grian ag taitneamh, an ghaoth ag séideadh, etc) and mimed these, getting others to guess what we were showing. We picked pictures from the mála draíochta and described the weather shown in the picture. We sang the song: "An bhfuil cead agam dul amach?":
One half of the room sang: 'An bhfuil cead agam dul amach, dul amach, dul amach, An bhfuil cead agam dul amach, dul amach ag sugradh?' The other half of the room replied with ' Níl cead agat dul amach, dul amach, dul amach, níl cead agat dul amach, tá sé ag cur báiste/tá cead agat dul amach, dul amach, dul amach, tá cead agat dul amach, tá an grian ag taitneamh.'
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6) Religion: There is also ample opportunity to integrate water into religion as Alive O2's term 3 lesson 1, 2 and 3 are all based on the theme of water, however we have not progressed this far in our Alive- O programme!
The theme of shopping and food could have lasted for two months never mind two weeks as there was so much scope for integration! Here are some of the shopping centered activities that were undertaken by senior infants!
1) Oral Language Development: We added a play shop area to the classroom for use during structured play and put price tags on all the items in it from 1c - 20c. We used real coins in the play center to pay for these items. 2) Maths: We learned all about money (1c up to 20c).
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We talked about the different characteristics of all the coins and played 'what's the mystery coin' games as a class and in pairs (they listened to the characteristics of the coins and told me which coin I/their partner was talking about).
We played feely bag games for identifying coins without seeing them (using size recognition mainly).
We also played bank and exchanged 1c coins for a single coin. (To make them aware of the value of each coin.)
We sorted coins in terms of value.
They used coins to buy items from a shopkeeper in their groups.
We added coins to solve problems and see how much money we had in our wallet. (Put dots on coins to remind us of their value and aid counting of money).
We kept a class piggy bank to make use of our new skills in adding money to see if we could buy a new item for the class shop at the end of the day (during the day I would ask them to put in a 2c or a 1c or a 5c coin until we had a number of coins in the piggy bank to add up at the end of the day).
3) Creative/functional writing: Writing a shopping list.
We read the story of 'Wallace's Lists' (see: Wallace's Lists book preview) and talked about all the things we could make lists about. We then used words from our food word wall in conjunction with our sounding out skills to write our own shopping lists which we later used in the play shop.
(Apologies for poor quality picture)
4) Gaeilge: Ag siopadóireacht.
We found food items for our siopa in our mála draíochta. 'An maith leat ___?' was asked of some of the children after each item was removed from the bag and placed in the shop. We learned the vocabulary of 'cheannaigh tú' by trying to guess what each pupil had bought and hidden from us. They also described their actions by saying 'cheannaigh mé___' or 'níor cheannaigh mé ' when a guess was given. We sang and acted out the song 'Cheannaigh mé ___, cheannaigh mé ____, cheannaigh mé ____agus d'ith mé é.' (To the tune of Polly Put the Kettle On). We later changed this song to 'Cheannaigh mé ___, cheannaigh mé ____, cheannaigh mé ____agus chaith mé é' when we were discussing an siopa éadaígh the following week.
5) History: Shops in the past.
We named and discussed grocery shops, pharmacies and sweet shops. We matched items sold in each to the correct shop. We then looked at pictures of what these shops looked like in the past, guessed which type of shop it was and spotted the differences and similarities between the old version and the new version.
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6) Geography: Mapping the Monster's Shopping Trip. We talked about places and things that you would see if you took a walk through a town. They listened to the Monster's Shopping Trip on the British Council Website:
They noted the journey the monsters took and the shops they visited. We then discussed making a map of this journey. I showed them how they would start by drawing the monster's house and then the road. We discussed things that might be around the road, buildings, bridges, lakes, trees, signs etc and added the shops mentioned in the story. They then created their own version of the monster's journey.
7) Art: Class Bakery. We talked about things that you might buy to eat in a bakery. We looked at pictures of these foods (cakes, buns, croissants, pies, doughnuts, biscuits, pastries) and talked about different cake designs. They then created their cakes and pasteries from clay. The only downfall of these creations was that when they dried they were quite brittle to handle and to paint. I covered them in PVA glue to harden them a little before we painted them to minimise damage. If I were making them again I would consider making them from homemade playdough in various colours and then bake them in the oven to harden them, meaning they wouldn't have to be painted. I would also have gone over them myself making sure all the little decorations they had stuck on were merged properly to the piece before it dried. Other than that, the kids loved this and they looked quite impressive on display in our class bakery (which the early finishers created a banner for)!
8) Music: Let's Go Shopping song "Let’s Go Shopping,
My latest adventures with Senior Infants have been based on the theme of spring. We started off with acknowledging the signs of spring by looking out the window and then at a spring picture which things kept disappearing from! They had to tell me what sign of spring (daffodils, cherry blossoms, lambs, nests, frog spawn etc.) had gone missing each time. We also acknowledged our new desktop wallpaper which I feel is an excellent daily reminder of the season!
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1) History:
We read the story of the Ugly Duckling talking about how he felt, how we could help him if we were there at the time and how we should treat people who are different. We then drew a picture of an event from the beginning, middle and end of the story. We cut the pictures out and gave them to our partners to sequence and stick onto some nice blue paper.
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2) English: Instructional writing: Following the theme of the ugly duckling we created our own four step ducklings from playdough. (Roll a small ball for the head, a big one for the body and make a tail, stick on googly eyes, stick on a beak.) After they had been made we drew a picture of each stage of the process in four boxes and wrote a sentence about each stage under each picture. We then took a picture of the finished product to stick onto our instructions at the end.
Next week we will be planting seeds and they will undertake a similar task following this activity!
( Edit: See our sown onions!
)
3) Science and Geography: We focused on animals and their young. We read the story ' Baa! Moo! What Will We Do?' about some farm animals who lost their babies.
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We helped the mother animals find the baby animal pictures that I had placed/hidden around the room. They named the baby animals when they spotted them and called out to them using the poem we are learning: Come My Chicks:
Come my chicks,
It's time for bed,
that's what mother hen said,
But first I'll count you just to see,
If you have all come back to me,
Chick 1, chick 2, chick 3, Oh dear!
Chick 4, chick 5, yes you're all here!
We replaced the words 'chicks' and 'hen' with whatever animal we were calling out for at the time. E.g piglets, pig, foal, horse, lamb, sheep, calf, cow, gosling, goose.
We also discussed differences and similarities between the mothers and their young as we found the baby animals.
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We then drew the stages ourselves and labelled them after.
4) Art:
We painted spring flowers focusing on different flowers we could make with different brush sizes: We dabbed big fluffy paintbrushes on the page to paint fluffy yellow flowers, red thin brushes to paint thin petals and thin dots of blue paint to paint bluebell like flowers. Then we painted in all the stems on the flowers and some grass to finish off!
5) Music:
We sang the song 'Over In the Meadow' (From the Right Note Programme: Senior Infants) about all the animals and their young and we made sound effects between each verse to represent the animal we sang about.
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6) History (lesson 2):
We read the Irish Legend of the Children of Lir on this website:
We linked this with drama by acting out important scenes from the story as we read through it e.g. the transformation of the children into swans, their travelling from lake to lake and their changing from swans to old people. We then drew pictures from the story and wrote a sentence to accompany what we had drawn. We sequenced some of the images drawn following this activity.
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So for two weeks in January I was in a classroom 'timezone'. Taking on the idea of developing their sense of time and the language of time was a much wider topic than I had originally thought! Here are some activities Senior Infants got up to during that...time... (excuse the pun!). 1) We sang some songs I nabbed off youtube to teach the sequence and names of the days of the week and months of the year... only problem with these is that they are so catchy I found myself singing them to myself for the whole fortnight! Days of the week:
Months of the Year:
So we played games with these songs like lining up the months/days and telling me which month/day is missing.
2) We made a class outline of what we do on each day of the week to refer to each morning and also to end the questions of 'when are we doing art??' etc. I got their ideas at the end of each day of what we should include and drew pictures beside each to aid comprehension of the chart.
We said the rhyme and talked about parts that rhymed and parts that didn't. We then composed a version as a class so that the whole rhyme... rhymed!
Our rhyme:
Hickory Dickory Dock,
The mouse ran up the clock,
The clock struck one,
The mouse was done,
The clock struck two,
The mouse bit you,
The clock struck three,
The mouse ran up a tree.
4) We made clocks! And they looked so good we turned them into a class mobile when we had finished the unit on time, by sticking them along a piece of string and hanging them from the ceiling. We made them from paper plates. I had stuck on address labels onto where the numbers would be to give them some guidance as to where they should write the numbers. I added hands to the clocks and they used them to tell me various times throughout our maths lessons. They loved decorating them to look really colourful!
6) Read the story: My Great Grandpa for history. Got this book from Amazon for an amazing price and it was worth every cent because the kids loved it! We talked about young people and old people and the concept of generations. We used our bodies to show the difference between old and young and where we might place people on the family tree (at the top: standing on our toes, in the middle or crouching low down for babies.) We made family trees of the characters in the story, placing the older characters we drew at the top and the younger ones we drew at the bottom.
7) Listened and responded to the 'Syncopated Clock' piece of music.
8) Learned about Ta and ti-ti (the timing of crotchets and quavers) in music, by telling them the story of Ta the deaf cat and her baby kittens (ti and ti).
9) We also started timing ourselves in terms of how long it would take us to get ready to go home every afternoon. I would put a line on the time we started with a whiteboard marker and then we would count the minutes that had passed when we had finished. This helped us get out quicker and also informally instilled in them the length of a minute or 5 minutes verses the length of an hour which we also timed one day.
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That's pretty much why I have started this blog. That and the fact that I am a big fan of teacher blogs and have got some brilliant ideas from these in the past. I also find a surprising lack of blogs based on the Irish primary school system so here's my contribution! While I, like any other teacher, have found lessons to be both successful and a total disaster, I will post some of my own tried and tested lessons for the benefit of anyone stuck in a planning rut! Hopefully I will also become a more organised person along the way!
