Community & Community Helpers

This week we are going to continuing studying Communities and begin on Community Helpers.

We started by sorting pictures of different objects (cars, buildings, people) into different types of communites - Suburban, Urban and Rural (town, city and country).  This project came from Teacher Book Bags (available from http://www.currclick.com/).  We colored in maps showing the streets and buldings in a community.  We read On the Town by Judith Caseley, which is a wonderful introduction to places and people in a community.

We've started a new Math curriculum with Georgie.   We are using a free program developed in England and Hungary called the "Mathematics Enhancement Programme".  So far Georgie likes it a lot - it has a nice mix of elements - physical activities, songs, writing pages, and discussion.

I'm trying to add a lot more games into our program.  We have a bunch of file folder games plus we received some new games for Christmas that should fit in nicely.  This week we played:  Winter Dominos (printed from DLTK-cards.com), Dr. Seuss ABC Stretch (similar to twister with letters and letter sounds), Picture/Letter match (file folder game), Fishing with Rover sight word game (file folder game from Frogever Smart Games) and Vicki played a color matching game with Smily Faces.

One of the things the kids received for Christmas was a chalkboard to be mounted on the wall.  I'm trying to find ways to allow them to be creative more often without having to worry about crayon and marker all over the walls, furniture, etc.  We ended up picking up a second one since they are currently not capable of sharing a 2 foot by 3 foot space without fighting.   The two boards are mounted underneath the bulletin boards used to display their school and art work.  The bulletin boards are high enough that they can't reach to pull things off.