The Classroom Environment
If you look around my classroom, you will see Sea things everywhere.
In the circle area I have a variety
of Sea poems and activities.
In
my pocket chart:
Down by the Bay sentence strips and word cards.
·
The children can create their own
Down by the Bay verse with the word cards. ·
The children can read the poem with
a pointer reading from left to right and top to bottom. On
the Bulletin Board:
Fish Look at
them flit Activities: Math Problem Solving:
How many
will then jump off? - One
child then writes the numbers in the space provided.
- Another
child picks the correct number of frogs and makes a math sentence with the
frogs. -The last
child takes away or subtracts the correct number of frogs from the lily pad. - We then
count how many are left Literacy
Activities On the
bulletin board beside my circle area, I have made a mural of photos with sea
creatures so that the children can see what a real whale, shark, octopus, manta
ray looks like in their natural environment.
These pictures also stimulate a lot of our discussions about sea life.
Around
the classroom I have a number of centers set up.
At the science center I have a number of sea shells, starfish, sea horse
and other sea things for investigating. I
also put out books for the children to look at to classify and compare sea
creatures.
Puppets: I
have a number of puppets set out for the children to make a puppet show or to
role-play. In the Rainbow Fish stories I always bring in new characters
to the story and we retell our own story. The
lobsters and crabs even get shiny scales from Rainbow Fish.
The
Writing Center
·
The children can match the word
cards to the sentence strips.
Scurrying
Chasing
But
none of them making the teeniest, teeniest sound.
In
small groups I create problem solving
activities
You could
also put an addition equation on the whale and the answers on the water sprays.
The children would have to find the matching water spray for the whale. 
 | At
the writing center, I have a variety of materials available for them. |
| I
have different sizes, shapes and colors of paper. |
| I
have pencils, pens, pencil crayons, crayons, pastels, fat markers, skinny
markers. |
| I
also have little books with just the pictures of the word cards above. The
children have to find the picture and print the word accordingly in their
book. |
Math
Center
At
the math center I have a number of colored fish and the book Fish Eyes by Lois
Ehlert, the children can sort, count, pattern, and add using the fish
manipulatives.
The children can also use the sorting
tray to sort fish, crabs, sharks, whales and different sea creatures according
to mammals or fish, or by color, size, shape, etc...
I also have plastic whales and
sharks, the children can put them in order smallest to largest or all the small
together, large together, big, medium, small etc...
Role
Play Center
We are in the process of building a
submarine. We have a refrigerator box laying horizontally on the ground. We have
two washer boxes attached one to the back and one to the front. In the middle of
the submarine we placed a medium sized box on the top to be the top of the
submarine. The children drew all of the portholes and I cut them out. At this
stage of our construction we are still fastening the boxes together. After the
fastening we will start to paint and put all of the gadgets on the inside. Our
submarine would then be complete.
