Friday, December 4, 2009

the "ool"s go to school

This week we worked with our final "official" word family, "ool". Of course, the kids will come up with their own word families to work with (this morning it was the "up" family!). In this story, Mama "ool" sends her kids off to the town of Conso-Nant's schools, only to find they can no longer play by the rules. I particularly like this story because in the end Mama decides that homeschooling is best!

This first drawing is J's, of the "ool" kids a the great gate to the town, with Mama shadowing them to see what happens during their school day. (That's Mama in the lower left hand corner, I'm really impressed by J's sense of perspective!)


Here's our town board, all set up for "ool". This was a really fun family for us -- the kids immediately made "Yule" despite the fact it's not in our story. And the kids quickly discovered other possible spellings of "ool" beyond the ool/ule depicted in the story. (For example, jewel and cruel.)



Zoo Boy's drawing, of the town board again, each of the "ool" children depicted with the naughty behavior they displayed, and Mama "ool" peeking over the gate to the town to see what they are doing.








J's writing. I've reduced the size of his "forest paths" so he has to write smaller.





Zoo Boy's writing. He decided to write extra words for "ool" (to the sides of the printed sheet), and he asked me to write "jewel" and "cruel" so he could write those too at the bottom. He also made up stories to go with all the words he wrote.

I have one more wrap-up exercise for them (for today), and then we'll be done with the word families during our main lesson time. I'll leave the town board and the family cards available for them to play with as they desire, and will probably come up with some fun story-building games for practice time in another month or so.

No comments: