Aquatic Ed-Ventures

We have been using the ocean theme to learn and practice tons of different reading foundational skills.  The children are loving the fiction and nonfiction books shared during read aloud.  For vocabulary, we learned the word aquatic.  Aquatic means living in or happening in the water.  See if your child can give you some examples and non examples of aquatic.  Here is one smart first grader's picture of aquatic in her vocabulary notebook.  She definitely can think of several great examples of aquatic.

We also used the aquatic theme to practice an important phonics and spelling skill.  When writers come to tricky words they don't know how to spell, they need to be able to segment the word into the sounds.  We learned a strategy called push and say.  In this strategy, we use the length of our arm to tap out how many sounds are in a word.  For instance, fish has three sounds: /f/- /i/- /sh/.

After we figure out how many sounds in the word, we make that many boxes.  Then, the writers figure out what letters to add to the boxes.  Watch this awesome speller segment the sounds of fish and push the letters to the correct boxes.

After we practiced segmenting and pushing up several different words together, the students set to work independently.  The children had to pick four different aquatic animals to segment and spell.  The students were excellent and hearing the sounds in words.

Last, but not least, we published our own books about Aquatic Animals.  We used the tricky words that we figured out how to spell in our books.  Besides practicing segmenting tricky words, the students also got practice writing sentences.  Students had to remember to begin sentences with a capital letter, use spaces between words, and end with proper punctuation.  What fantastic writers!