Diving into Summer School!

While many people were celebrating their last day of school this week, our summer school session has already begun! 

After looking over my new group of students' end of year assessments, it seemed like the main areas students needed extra practice in were rhyming and letter ID in literacy and counting and patterns in math. Here is a little peak at some of our "Ocean Themed" workstation we have been working on this week:

For this letter ID workstation, I wrote letters with permanent marker on dollar store shells and buried them in a tub of sand. The kids love "digging them out" with those cute little shovels and matching them to the ABC mat.

In my "rice table" I have plastic store bought shells that have letters and numbers on them along with a few sea creatures. Students use the tweezers to pluck the letters from the rice and match them to an ABC mat during literacy or match the numbers to a number line during math. They can also pull out the sea creatures and sort them by shape or by color.

Here is a cute little freebie by Lovely Literacy and More that you can find here on teachers pay teachers. First, I have students put together an alphabet train puzzle (not pictured) to practice ABC order, then I have them line these little guys up underneath an fill in the missing letter using magnetic letters. 

In this workstation, students first line up their ocean alphabet cards (found here) in ABC order, then go fishing for letters and match them to the letter line they created. I think that those magnetic letters and fishing pole both came in a set from Lakeshore. 

This workstation is a student favorite! They pick a letter seashell (that I made), then find the Fridge Phonics letter that matches it. While the Fridge Phonics song is playing, students sing along with the letter song while they write the letter in the sand. I put a piece of scrapbook paper in the bottom of the pencil box so that students could see the letter that they wrote better. I just used what I had in the classroom but I want to swap it out for a brighter piece that really stands out through the sand! 

For my students that don't need as much practice identifying letters, I have some vocabulary, word builder, rhyming, syllable, and sentence writing workstations for them. 

Here, students use magnetic letters to build the ocean words.

At this workstation, students use ocean stamps to either find the words that represent the stamp in this "Sea Life" book and write the word next to the picture or write the sentence "I see a ______." and fill in the ocean animal that they stamped (depending on their level). 

 In math, students can....

Use ocean stamps to make a pattern. I love doing the patterns on sentence strips because then you can staple the strip into a loop to make a hat. My students proudly wear their patterns on their head all day and then beg me to make another one the next day! 

Here, students place the numbered seahorse in numerical order, then match the correct number of "bubbles" to the number beside the seahorse. I found the seahorse number cards for free on teachers pay teachers here. For the bubbles, I just broke apart a string of blue beads in sets from 1 all the way to 20. 

In this "treasure hunting" workstation, students first match the different jewel shapes to the treasure chest, then graph which shapes they used on this graphing tray.

They can either graph by color or by shape.

In this workstation, I provided students with plastic sea creatures in several different colors. Student can sort the sea creatures by shape or by color. (I promise I actually do know my colors and the top two sections in the picture on the right are different colors! They just look the same in the picture.)

This last one I am going to show is another student favorite. I printed the shells off of Sparklebox here and got a bag of small mixed shells from the dollar store. Students put the numbers in numerical order and count out the correct number real shells for each paper shell. *If you have never checked out Sparklebox before, I highly recommend it! They have resources for basically every theme imaginable and almost everything is FREE!*

This first week was a bit of an adjustment for both the students and myself but I am hoping now that we have established a routine, we can dive into more learning this coming week! Dive, get it? See what I did there? ;)