Chicka Chicka ... Boom BOOM!

Whew! What a couple of weeks! I had a very busy weekend last weekend, so I did not get a chance to post then, and last week has been Careful Corners, which I have been in charge of, so no time to post again. Every evening I intend to go home, have dinner, and then post our happenings. But then family life gets in the way, as it should! So I am staying late at school tonight, determined to get everything caught up!

The week of Sept. 5, we read one of my favorite books, Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. This is a wonderful book about some naughty little letters who climb up in a tree. Be sure to ask your child what happened to them!

After reading the book, I showed the students a bucket of sand, in which I had hidden magnetic letters. The students took turns finding a letter and matching it to the corresponding lowercase letter on the easel.

 All done!

The next day, we got a chance to experience a real coconut! I have to confess, even I had not tasted coconut milk until my missions trip this summer. And I had never opened a coconut until this day!

First, we passed the coconut around to everyone and used our senses of sight, touch, and smell to observe it before we opened it.

Unfortunately, I didn't get any pictures of the coconut-cracking, since I was doing the cracking! But we found out that coconut milk is clear, not white, as we thought. After tasting it, we discovered that it is sweeter than cow's milk. Some of us liked it, and some didn't - and that's ok!

Then we observed shaved coconut with our magnifying glasses. Since we only have 6 magnifying glasses, we had to take turns.

The next day, we sorted different colors of band-aids by color - this was too easy for most of us! I think next year I'll have to add lots of different shapes and sizes as well.

Finally, we made simple Chicka Boom Glyphs. A glyph is a picture that represents data. Our glyph key is the following:

Pink background = I am a girl

Orange background = I am a boy

4 leaves = I liked Chicka Chicka Boom Boom best

5 leaves = I liked Chicka 123 best

# of coconuts = 3 of siblings I have

These glyphs were pretty simple for the beginning of the year. As we go, we will make more involved ones to share with you.

*** I intended for our names to start at the top of the tree and go down, but I did not do a very good job of modeling, so some ended up jumbled up. If your child's letters are jumbled or out of order, you may want to have them practice writing their name (with one capital / rest lowercase, please!) at home, just to make sure they are aware of the order of the letters.

Please enjoy "reading:" our glyphs!

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