Only a teacher could get excited about a dry erase circle. I mean really! Anyway, I ordered these Avery Dry Erase Circles from Walmart.Com on Saturday and they arrived on my doorstep yesterday. I applied them to my table today and used them not even an hour later. EXCITED. They come in packs of 3 for just under $7 and shipping is 97 cents per item. Very reasonable. I bought 3 packs. My table is a little unusual and seats 8. I keep 6 chairs there for Guided Reading, but my math groups are 7-8 so I wanted to have them there for math also. And because I was so EXCITED I gave myself one too :)
As usual, we made the sight word we focused on in our book, can, and then the wrote the word using their model and then without. It was really nice not to have to pass out dry erase boards!
Here's a new activity for you. We read a book today called "What Can You Do?" All of the sentences in the book were "I can ____." Yesterday we interactively wrote "I can play." on a sentence strip like I posted about last week. Today I introduced their Guided Reading Journals. (This is 8 1/2 x 14 paper folded in half and stapled...really simple and it keeps me from having to get paper all the time.)
Today I wanted them to independently write the sentence we wrote yesterday. I draw blanks for them as we say the sentence together. We do this for every child's journal. This helps them to remember the sentence and hear the words several times so it will be easier when they write. This was our first time, so it's very step by step for now. They wrote I and can pretty much independently and we sounded out play together. Having the blanks helps them to remember space, write left to right and how big or small their writing should be.
Finally I had them illustrate and tell me what they were doing. One friend told me he and his brother were playing tag - the picture was really cute. Obviously this cutie is playing outside.
Hopefully you are learning some activities from my Guided Reading posts - let me know if you have any questions! :)
