Valentine's Day!

Happy Valentine's Day!  A few kids pointed out that today was in fact not Valentine's day.  However, since we don't have school on Saturday we celebrated it today!  This morning was a blast learning about the letter U.  We used a big balloon with a capital U and a small balloon with a lower case u to practice the /u/ sound.  We made the balloon go /u/ /u/ /u/ - UP! and then tossed it to another student to repeat the action.  We also talked about all the words in the mini U book from the Amazing Action Alphabet.  We talked about the family of frogs in the book and acted out all the actions that they do throughout the book.  After snack time each child got a box of heart candies to sort and graph.  We practiced one-to-one counting and determining which color and the most and the least. 

 After math we handed out Valentines to our friends with our decorated Valentine bags and then did a letter review game with balloons.  Each balloon had a letter on it.  The idea of the game was to look at the letter on the balloon and then sing the song about the letter name and sound ("N says /n/, N says /n/, every letter makes a sound, N says /n/").

 This afternoon we read a fun story called "The Day it Rained Hearts".  It's a simple and sweet story about a little girl making Valentine cards out of hearts that rained from the sky. Each child then drew their favorite part and added words to their drawing.  We then took turns sharing our work with the whole class.

 We did our regular guided reading groups today so everyone has 2 new baggy books to be reading.   For math we repeated our lesson from last Wednesday about units and sticks of 10.  Then we got out our math cards and paired up to play the matching game.  PLEASE play this game LOTS at home!

We had a great time playing outside for a bit.  Cheering for kids who completed Ready2Read units, coloring Valentine bags and handing out our Valentines.  It was a great day!