Three little Pigs Week

Recently we spent a week comparing versions of the Three Little Pigs. The kids loved it. They spent time reading with friends and discussing the books. They made great charts and had lots of fun.

Then we built our own houses of straws and they all made a hypothesis about how well their house would stand up to wind (a fan).

Perimeter anchor chart

  Perimeter, my kids kept trying to make it more difficult then it was.  So I brought it down to some examples in our classroom.  We measured the perimeter of objects we can walk around to see how far around something is.  That helped.  A couple are still struggling with the concept and now we are moving onto area so I hope the comparison will give me another way to teach it.

Suffix anchor chart

  

When I started this blog I fully intended to post everything I do... Yeah, that was a bit ambitious.  So I have decided to start now and focus on one post a week :)

Last week we focused on suffixes.  My goal was for the kids to learn the rules rather then just memorize the twenty spelling words.  We did some activities with them and I gave all the rules a name.  I numbered them and for each activity they did from our phonics program I required them to provide the rule number.  Interestingly those who did well on the spelling test were not all the ones that got the rules.  However, I do feel it was good because all students walked away from these lessons realizing many words are formed in a certain way and follow a pattern.