Sight words and centers

Let's be honest ... learning sight words is not always the most exciting thing in the world. It's necessary, due to the frequency with which the words are used, but because most sight words involve rote memorization, it's just not much fun. Which is why we're always looking for unique ways to make this task a little more enjoyable! And when building things like words, what better tool to use than legos ... the original toy building blocks!

Using clothespins to build sight words not only reinforces the words themselves, it strengthens fine motor muscles!

Other things we use in the classroom -- and you can use at home -- are building sight words with play-dough, Wikistix, and wooden craft sticks. We also enjoy a rousing game of "I Have, Who Has ..." which requires students to read the sight words. What fun things do you do at home to review sight words? We'd love to hear your ideas!

Finally!

It's been a bit of a crazy few weeks in the world of K5 ... and it doesn't help that Mrs. Viall is working with another class right now. (Two more weeks ... two more weeks!) Mrs. Misty has been great about sending me photos, but because of some weird technical difficulties involving zipped files, I haven't been able to get the pictures into the right format for Google photos and, as an extention, the blog.

Until now!

So without further ado, here are some fun photos that sum up our thematic work during January. Our unit for most of the month was arctic animals (we included penguins while learning that they are in fact antarctic animals). Our students enjoyed pretending they were carrying penguin eggs!

We also learned about the ways an arctic animal stays warm while living in such a cold climate! The secret -- blubber!

Finally, we had a blast building polar bear caves! It was fun seeing the students' differing designs.

We had a lot of fun learning about cold climates and the animals that live there, but we are definitely ready for warmer weather!