Playing and Learning Together

One of the many things I love about OCS is that we are a school commited to engaging our children in many different ways of learning. One of the ways we learn is playing partner or independent games as well as from our peers and older friends.  I am devoting this entry to sharing a few examples of activities that may not get captured on paper or can be seen in your child's Thursday packet.

Math
We play a lot of games during our math time.  New games are introduced each week and we build a menu of choices that the children can choose from during math.  There are different menus for different groups of kids and the menus are constantly changing as the children outgrow games.  Some games have a written component that requires the recording of equations or the coloring of an answer.  Some are card games that are played with a partner or individually.  All the games help reinforce the learning of math facts, learning new strategies for solving math equations, or using manipulatives for learning and practicing new concepts.  Games may be a memory game that asks children to find the equation and answer that match, a dice game that may require adding numbers or doubling, a spinner game that asks children to spin a number and spin an action (double, double +1, double +2), or adding number using our base ten blocks.

Doubles Go Fish with the help of our handy Doubles Book.

Pull a stick with tricky doubles, build it if you need to, and tell your friend the answer.

Number Race! Roll the die, double it and record.

Literacy
On Mondays, the children are introduced to new spelling patterns.  Each group of partners sorts their words and records the words.  On Wednesdays we play a little more with these words by chosing a set of words and writing  a silly sentence in our Silly Sentence books. They get pretty silly!  We also play different word games using our set of words for the week. 

Get a word family match and add a part to the jack-o-lantern.

Play a word card that matches the vowel pattern -crazy 8 style.

Theme
We continue exploring the world of the Middle Ages.  This last week we recreated some of the technology used to get through those thick castle walls.  Our class really loved learning how to build a catapult from a friend in the older class.

Learning how to make a catapult from our older friends.

Ready, aim, catapult!

Field Trips
We had a wonderful afternoon at the Nisqually leaning about estuaries and tidal zones.

All sorts of cool things to investigate!

Crabs!