Weekly Wrap Up...Post Office, QR Codes and Hearts!

I've been wanting to write a weekly blog post on a Friday for a long time. I love sharing what we do in our classroom and it seems like Friday is the perfect day to catch up with all of you!

To start, I am still off on a leave of absence from falling down the stairs and injuring my back. Many thanks to Ms. P. and Mrs. Petrone for taking over (and doing such a fabulous job!). I am really anxious to get back to work since I send about 4000 e-mails to Ms. P. during the day to see what the students are interested in and how I can support them from home.

Each year, I like to formally introduce letter writing to the students (although they seem to do much of this on their own throughout the year! They are constantly writing each other letters, cards, pictures and messages). We introduce the sight words "To" and "From" and learn how to compose a simple letter to our friends using a combination of pictures and/or simple words.

So, of course, to make this much more fun we set up a Post Office!

The best part was dropping their finished mail into the mail box!

You can see how we created this centre from years past by reading {this} blog post. It always changes whenever we set this up at our Dramatic Centre based on students' interests!

You can find this Dramatic Play Centre here:

Here are some other centres that the students explored this week:

Using pipe cleaners and coloured beads, students created a pattern bracelet.

This week's poem was so much fun! Our students enjoyed pointing to the colour words and reading along.

This provocation invited the children to sort animals that hibernated or migrated since they have been reading many books these past few weeks.

Lots of interest in patterning so it was extended to the light table where students could use a variety of materials to create patterns!

We introduced the Alphabet QR Codes activity (similar to a write the room). Students worked together using the iPad to scan the QR Codes that they found around the room, look at the picture and decide which beginning sound it starts with and check it off their list.

SO.MUCH.FUN!

You can find this activity {here}: