How to Make Friends

This morning the kids practiced sorting different objects. They each had a category of objects...transportation, animals, dinosaurs and fruit. The kids sorted the categories by color and then by the different objects. They also had game boards to use to match the objects that are the same.

During morning circle we talked about our new week of school starting. We practiced saying the date, the days of the week and months of the year. We also counted to 30. Then we worked on our "everyday words." This week we added blue, yellow and green. These will be good words to learn to read because we will be using them later this week! We reviewed the lip popper and tip tapper "sound brothers" and talked about words that start with those sounds.

 Our story today was "Friends" by Rob Lewis. The story is about a rabbit boy named Oscar who moves to a new place. Like a lot of kids, Oscar finds himself needing some new friends. Thing is, he's not sure he wants to play with any of them when it seems like they won't want to go swimming with him.The kids in Oscar's new neighborhood all invite Oscar to do things with him. Oscar, however, isn't really sure that he wants to. He doesn't want to play with a boy named Charles when he offers to let him look through his telescope --- he doesn't like people who are smarter than him and he doesn't want to play with Maisy --- she invites him to play her drums, but he finds her to be way too loud. Oscar wonders if he will ever find anyone to friends with. Then he learns that making new friends sometimes requires sharing and doing what the other friend wants. After reading the story we brainstormed different things we liked to do with our friends, on the playground and in our neighborhood. They practiced asking their friends to play with them. We also talked about things we don't do to our friends.

 For art today we made two rabbit friends. The kids had to follow directions to assemble the rabbits. They each had a body, head, feed, two ears and a nose. Then the kids recalled something Oscar did with his new friends in the story we read.

During our writing center the kids wrote in their journals, practiced the letter "T" and worked on making letters on the magnetic board. We also used file folder games to practice other academic skills like counting, numbers, and colors.

It is going to be a fun week learning about our friends!