More apples and a freebie!

I must begin this post with a big thank you to the few that left comments on the last post!  Thank you for taking time out of your day or night to read this here blog and to leave a comment.  I have emailed you each a copy of the "Letter Pickin" activity.  Enjoy!

Like I had mentioned in my last post, I am introducing themes a week in advance this year with the whole class and then adding it into their workstations the following weeks.  Today for our whole group math lesson we used the following poem to work on numbers and the idea of taking away.

http://www.alphabet-soup.net/dir2/applesong.html

 

You can click on the picture to go to the website where I found the poem.  All I did was type it up and put it onto a large piece of posterboard.  If you look closely, you will see that there is a small piece of Velcro in the first spot.  This is where the numbers were changed as apples fell down.  After we read through the poem, I called on owls to tell me what the new number was and to find the correct number card. 

 

To make this more concrete, the owls each drew a tree and were given five "apples" to start with in the tree.  As we read the poem, we moved apples down out of the tree to allow for counting and visualizing.

I also got a little jump on next week's planning and put together a simple reader that stuck with our apple theme but also helped reinforce our work with the sight words I, like, the and color words.  Head over to my TPT store and grab it for free!

Have a wonderful evening and remember tomorrow is WEDNESDAY!
~Erin