Chicka Chicka Boom Boom

I hope that everyone had a nice holiday break! It went really quick at our home, but I was excited to have the kids back and am ready to dive into the last half of the year. We are now starting to focus on recognizing our last names. We had our first names on our attendance chart and would find them and move them down to the school when we got there. Now, it is our last names that we will look for and move down to our school.

This week was themed around a well-known alphabet book by Bill Martin Jr. titled, Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. It is the entire alphabet trying to climb a tree, and tumbling down because it gets too heavy. But, they never give up and try again. We had a coconut tree for centers today, the one Aria is holding below, that we had our velcro letters climb. We hid the letters in different coconuts (plastic Easter eggs) around the room, and as we found them, we added them to our tree.

We also made our own version of the coconut tree. The kids chose letters in their name, and other craft foam letters to have climb their tree. We then talked about what letter made it to the top on their tree first.

We had these Chicka Chicka Boom Boom trees at our literacy center where we would grab a coconut out of our letter bag, and find its uppercase or lowercase counterpart and add it to our tree.  

And, since monkeys love to climb trees, we had our monkey math links out for our math center. Each monkey has a number from 1-20 on its belly, and we added that many math links to its arm.

We also had our monkey alphabet links. Each monkey had a capital letter of the alphabet on its belly, and their arms snapped together so that we could make one big monkey alphabet chain.

And, our writing center was our magnet boards. The kids could write on the boards just as they were and work on their names on the number we are working on, or we have cards that can be placed over the magnet boards to guide them on formation of each letter of the alphabet.

We are having our parent-teacher conferences the week of January 21st, so please check your child's backpack to note your designated date and time. Please have them back to me as soon as possible so that any changes that need to be made can be accommodated.

Thanks!!