Indians and Pilgrims

NOTE: This theme is meant as an introduction to Native Americans and Pilgrims. I have intentionally used the word Indian to introduce the letter I. Indian, however, is not an accurate description of Native Americans. For more information please see this link. There are also many different tribes of Native Americans that have very different traditions. Though the Pilgrims were in contact with the Wampanoag, this theme introduces ideas from many different tribes.

We had great fun this morning as everyone came in they colored their I headband from the Moffatt Girls.  We added feathers behind the I for a headdress and a Pilgrim style hat on the back side so they could decide what side to have in front.  We listened to Native American Round Dance music while we made our headbands and while we read stories about the Pilgrims and Indians.  Next we moved into reading.  We practiced the letter Ii on the SMARTboard and each child took a turn tracing the letters while we all said, "/i/"!

 We had a blast in art today painting with feathers.  We used rather small craft feathers and the creative artwork that came out of it was quite fun and interesting. Most pictures included small strokes of paint rather than a big mess of paint that usually happens with preschoolers.  We had a fun time exploring big/little and quantities with the dry corn and oodles of buckets, scoops and containers!

 I took a video of our reading lesson this morning.  Because of the blog restrictions I had to split it into 3 videos (a total of 15 minutes in length).  It may be helpful to watch through them to see how we do our shared reading lesson together.  The way I read through books (even one-on-one with beginning readers) is to sound out each word and then go back and fluently reread the sentence.  I'd highly encourage you to do this at home.  The beginning reader books that we use throughout the whole year come from The Amazing Action Alphabet. 

In the afternoon we started our day out with the corn (it was out already and cleaning it up after didn't seem so daunting to me with such great helpers). They LOVED playing with the corn.  It was "popcorn" and "ice cream" and "for sale".  The creativity was awesome!  We had our regular reading lessons working within our small reading groups to master the skills appropriate.

 During math today we talked about AB patterns and how to "read" a pattern.  We took turns sharing our unifix cube patterns with the whole class "reading" the colors (red, orange, red, orange) and the letter names (a, b, a, b).  They picked it up quickly and were able to identify areas of their pattern that didn't work correctly and fix the problem.  We also painted with feathers this afternoon after a conversation about it now being November and the month of Thanksgiving.