8.19.19

Today I introduced the Approaches to Learning stations. We will do these each morning. 

 In order to be prepared for lifelong learning and conduct purposeful inquiry, learners need to master a whole range of skills which are relevant to all subject areas as well as life outside school.  The IB calls these "Approaches to Learning". These are all of the Approaches to Learning skills. 

These are BIG words for which we have little understanding. We can gain a better understanding of these by introducing them through play. That's where the Approaches to Learning stations come in. 

The first skill I taught was Social Skills. 

In social skills they are able to play a variety of boards games that must be played with other people. We wouldn't be practicing our social skills if we were doing it by ourselves. 

Peaceable Kingdom makes GREAT games for this. They are cooperative games where the groups works together to complete a task. Rather than there being 1 winner or 1 loser, the group together wins or loses the game. 

We did our first number talks today. I showed them this configuration of dots and asked them what they noticed. I love hearing their thinking!

Then I showed them some pictures and they had to quickly see if they could figure out how many dots their were. Then I asked them to show me how they saw the number they came up with. 

We sang a Subtilizing Song. 

A quick, fun thing you could do at home is to watch this song and have your child practice their subtilizing at home! 

Still wondering what subtilizing is??? Watch this brief You Tube video for the explanation. It's an important skill for them to know in developing their number sense. 

We launched our Readers Workshop today. We are still working on getting our minutes of independent reading. But I went into more detail about what readers workshop will look like and what they will be doing in it. 

We worked on our handwriting today. I showed them our handwriting books and we did the first couple of pages. 

We also talked about what Writers Workshop will look like. Today we brainstormed things we could write about if we didn't have ideas. 

BRAIN BREAK!

Each day during announcements we state our Pinkerton PRIDE. It stands for Practice Responsibility, Remain Safe, Include Others, Display Respect, Engage in Learning. 

Each day this week we will talk about one piece of this. Today we read, "The Cat in the Hat". We talk about how the cat was very irresponsible and the fish was responsible. We talked about better choices they all could have made to practice be responsible. :)