It led to a discussion of rhyming. This is a new concept for many of students and they're still shaky on the concept. For instance, even though "AND" and "BAM" have similar sounds to "MAN", they're not quite rhymes. Of course, it helped our discussion that there are 3 students with the last name "TRAN".
Other words students made with the AN pattern were: FAN, RAN, GRAN and VAN. We also talked about other rhyming words and patterns, like Mouse/House and Cat/Sat. This is a powerful concept to reinforce when reading and writing with your child, because it helps to build pattern recognition.
Another concept we're currently building is the idea of More and Less. Our question of the day has been related to this idea for some time. When asking "How many letters are in your name?" or "How many people are in your family?", I also place cards with the words "Less", a number between 1 and 10, and "More". It's surprising how tricky this is for many students. Even when they can count to ten, they're often unsure which numbers are more or less.
Today I also placed some shapes in our painting centre to see what would come of it. Here are some of the preliminary results:
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| Two trees and a constellation |
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| What I like about this one is that she used the outine she'd painted and filled it in in a contrasting colour. |
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| This is a butterfly. |
