Saturday's Five for Friday

Once again, I'm a little late for my Five for Friday post.  Keeping up with my blog is a little like keeping up with the newspaper.  I usually read the news a day late, and do the puzzles on Saturday and Sunday during the school year.  At least my well informed hubby keeps me up to date on stuff that happens around the world.

So, without further ado, here are my five:

1.  For the last week and a half, my little cuties have been practicing working in their stations tubs.  I made chart for the anchor wall (note to self: take a picture of it) that details how to work in small groups or with a partner.  It is quite similar to the D5 I-Chart in its wording.  For these practice sessions, I placed pre-k (pssst, don't tell the kiddos) activities from The Mailbox into each tub.  Because they were preschool activities, the kids could be successful working independently without having difficulty with the task.  The purpose of these practice sessions was to learn to work in small groups.  And, I am pleased to report that they did a great job!  We start the real deal on Monday!

2.  We learned how to use our Writing Binders this week.  They will be part of our D5 "Work on Writing" once we get to that part of the D5 program.  I figured it would be good to let them practice using the binders with simple pages (these are letter pages from Jolly Phonics).  Everyone was really excited to get to use a binder.  It's funny how little things like that can be exciting when you are 5 or 6!

3.  We worked diligently on identifying, writing, and counting groups of objects to five this week.  The Kinders had fun rainbow writing their numbers with my Little Bird's Count & Write activity.

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4.  Our ever-changing Focus Wall.  I hang materials that we use in lessons each week so that the kiddos can "play" with them.  During our developmental centers time, students enjoy using pointers to interact with the material hanging on display.  They know that they cannot remove items (except the straws in the place value pocket chart if they wish to count them - they just cannot change how many there are  ~ we use this for our day counting activity).  It's so cute to see them play teacher!  (Do I really sound like that!?!?)  The skills cards clipped here and there satisfy our district's requirement of posting weekly objective.

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5.  My horse loving girls.  

 Emily & Amelia with Emily's faithful old Arabian, "Mystery."  PS Happy Birthday, Emily!

 Isabella taking her first riding lesson. 

 (She's going to be in her first horse show next week!  Lead line class, of course.)

Olivia watching the horses as Papa feeds them.  She's one today ~ it won't be long before she's on a pony!  (Yep, she was born on Aunt Emily's birthday last year!)