Teaching Kiddos

  STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering,Arts and Math) Education activities promote the use of cross-disciplinary tools and critical thinking skills in an inquiry and solution-based learning environment. The Mayflower boat building challenge was not only a fun challenge for our kiddos, but it will allow kids to gain new knowledge that they can then apply to problems they encounter in their everyday world. The students were given : 3 sheets of foil 1 plastic Baggie         With just a small amount of materials, the kiddos had to be super creative with constructing a boat to bring the "pilgrims" over to the New World.   After each group brainstormed the perfect way to construct their boat , they immediately built it. Once it was built it was brought over to the testing area. At the testing area , the pilgrims " belt buckles" we're put onto the boat. This allowed us to see how many pilgrims would be able to be on the boat before it would sink. The team with the h

What do a cowgirl, a mailbox, and a notebook have in common? Actually, nothing … except for the little fact that they all happen to be  compound words .   Most of the time, compound words are easy to tackle if we think of them as two smaller words that are pushed together to form a new word. milk + shake = milkshake  mail + box = mailbox  note + book = notebook But compound words can cause confusion for beginning readers and spellers. Here's a practical tip for teaching compound words.   Teach your kiddo how to look for the two smaller words in the compound word. An easy way to do this is with  letter tiles . Build a compound word such as  bathtub using the tiles. Explain to your kiddo that the word bathtub has two smaller words in it, and invite him to find those two smaller words. Letter tiles are great for this activity because your kiddo can separate the compound word into two words, like this:       Suddenly, longer words are no longer scary. Yay!!See why we love letter tiles

We love getting into character whenever possible. This week,  room 5 became filled with pirates!  We first did our anchor chart that focused on our phonics skill for the week- bossy R.    We talked about letters making sounds in words and how Simetimes two letters put together can make a single sound.  We discussed how we were going to learn about the letters  a  and  r .   These two letters work as a team.  When, we see the letter  a   in a word with the letter  r  after it, the  r  controls the  a.   This means that the sound that these two letters makes is /ar/.          Then it was time to pass out the eye patches ( those make the kiddos " officially" pirates). Once they only had 1 good working eye, it was time for them to search for buried treasures. They found the golden coins and sorted then out .   In the end the kiddos loved it so much , the gave the activity TWO HOOKS UP!