We are working on building independence in our literacy station/Daily 5 routine. The Daily 5 literacy activities are Read to Self, Read to Someone, Work on Writing, Word Work, and Listen to Reading. Eventually, I will work with students in small groups during this time, but for now I am helping to ensure students can work independently within each work station. Here's a glimpse at today's Daily 5 stations.
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Dry erase boards are one of my favorite teaching/learning tools. They are a fantastic way to keep everyone interested and active in their learning, and they allow me to walk around and quickly see who's "getting it" and who might need more support. Students love them, so it's a win-win. Even not-so-fun learning tasks are made more fun with a shiny new dry erase board and marker in hand! Everyone put forth their best effort during our first try with these boards. Hooray, kindergarten!
Last week, students spent some time setting a goal for kindergarten. I asked, "What do you hope to learn about or get better at doing in kindergarten?" Inevitably, some of the answers involved things I do not directly impact--getting a goal in soccer, crossing the monkey bars successfully, going to bed later... :-) You get the idea. After clarifying the parameters for creating a "Hope and Dream" for kindergarten, students set some pretty amazing goals. Here are a few:
And, many, many more! Stay tuned for a full list of everyone's Hopes and Dreams. My objective for this exercise was two-fold. First, it's critical that students set goals for their own learning. Working with a goal in mind is motivational! Second, when we know about each other's goals for kindergarten, we can come up with rules for our classroom that will allow everyone to achieve his/her goal. All work and no play? No way! We have choice time every day. Students enjoy having some free time, and they create amazing things! This is a critical time for student learning, as well, particularly in the areas of language and social/emotional development. Play=talk=learning! Students are also strengthening their academic skills, as our choice time is a time to finish up missed work and extend prior learning through related activities. Playdough and painting were popular choices last week. We worked together to create rules for two times of our day--choice time and math exploration. I have been talking about expectations for every time of our school day, but involving students in rule creation makes them so much more invested! We have been in school long enough now for students to understand why following the rules benefits everyone--and there is so much more buy-in when we create rules together! I am so proud of how seriously students took the job of creating rules.
Letters/Sounds Students have been assessed (or soon will be) on their knowledge of letters/sounds. The goal is to know 100% of letters/sounds by May of the kindergarten year (or sooner!). Practice at home is extremely helpful. I will post some ideas for how to practice these skills in a future blog post soon. We will explore letters and sounds in many ways at school--through songs, movements, short videos, written practice, games, websites, and more. Our goal is for all students to know 18-26 upper case letters, 16-26 lower case letters, and 16-26 letter sounds by the end of the first trimester (end of November). Sight words are words students should know how to read on sight, as they are the most commonly seen words in print. Therefore, being able to automatically recall these words helps in reading. They are also helpful words to know how to spell, and we will work on spelling them too. The major focus, however, will be on reading them on sight. I will provide sight word flash cards at the first parent-teacher conference so you can help your child at home. To meet grade level standards, students should be able to read 85-100% of these words accurately by May. We will practice a lot at school! By the end of the first trimester (end of November), the goal is for students to recognize 10 or more of our 40 kindergarten sight words. Below are some photos of some of our literacy times in kindergarten last week--Read to Self practice (independent reading), ABC stations (sorting letters, handwriting practice on magnadoodles, visiting Starfall.com on the Chromebooks, reading alphabet poems, working on Letter Bb and Cc minibooks), and some free reading/writing/drawing time. We also started Writing Workshop! More information on this to come, as I did not get any pictures of this important time of our day this week. It can be hard to remember to take photos--we are certainly not idle very often in kindergarten! Honestly, I feel I should wear roller skates! :-)
I was impressed with how well students remembered their 2nd/3rd grade reading buddies after a full week! We visited Miss Knue's classroom this time, since they came to us the week before. Everyone worked well together and got great reading practice. Repeated reading of familiar text is a research-proven way to improve reading fluency. Awesome reading, everyone! I am so excited to announce that we have officially launched our reading buddies routine in kindergarten! Our buddy class is Miss Knue's 2nd/3rd grade. They visited us on Friday and read books from their book boxes. We will take turns visiting each other's classrooms, and the K students will get to read to their 2nd/3rd grade book buddies next week (yes--it's true!). This time, we did not have our book bins stocked with books, but we will next week. Miss Knue is another new-to-Blair teacher. Stay tuned to learn about our technology buddies in Mr. Walter's 4th grade class!
We spent some of our math time on Thursday and Friday exploring patterning with our math tools. Check out some of our creations! And, some of my teacher readers out there might be thinking that making patterns are not in the Kindergarten Common Core State Standards...but they are. You just have to dig to find the language. As one of my new favorite blogging teachers (www.kindergartenkindergarten.com) writes: Kindergartners love patterns. Or should I say "pat-ter-ens." They're super fun! But what they don't know is that they are an essential building block in their understanding about numbers. What starts out in kindergarten as making pretty designs with pattern blocks eventually leads to skip counting, repeated addition (and therefore multiplication and division), algebraic reasoning, and beyond! So it's important that we provide them with a solid foundation. So, we will continue with our work with patterns in many ways throughout kindergarten--not just the "pretty and fun" kind as seen in the photos below, but the patterns that are the foundation of our number system. In fact, the concept of patterns is pretty fundamental in our world! Think seasons, life cycles, architecture/design, weather...the list goes on. And, perhaps most important to remember in kindergarten--they are just plain fun. During our math workshop recently, students have had the opportunity to freely explore many math materials. These are materials we will later use for specific math learning activities. The rationale is simple: students need to play with the math tools first in order to learn effectively with them later. Naturally, through this play, much learning occurs. In just 30 minutes today, I was part of (or overheard) so many great math conversations! We talked about shape names (2-D and 3-D), created and extended patterns, problem solved how to get towers to be taller and more stable, sorted objects by many attributes, estimated quantities, compared numbers, analyzed data (can you find our 'live' bar graph below?), counted, and much more. Students are also learning to work in partnerships, which I call "thinking partners." Sharing about what we are learning is so very important, and our partnerships help facilitate that conversation. It's a work in progress (always!), but we are off to a good start. We are working diligently to build our reading community in kindergarten. Students have lots of time with books every day, which helps to foster an appreciation of books and reading. In Reading Workshop, the focus of our mini-lessons has been about our reading identies--where we like to read, our favorite reading memories, and our favorite types of books to read. We have many children who enjoy reading to learn new things, so nonfiction books will be very popular with this class. We have some favorite characters too, and Pete the Cat tops that list. I can't wait to introduce everyone to Elephant and Piggie (Mo Willems) and many more. Books are amazing, and a love of books helps develop excellent readers. We are on our way!
We had the pleasure of a visit from our principal Mrs. Morgan on Friday morning. I invited her in to help model our sharing routine. In our classroom, sharing is done only orally--no toys, etc. The person who shares tells us something about themselves--a story or news--and the class responds with three questions. We will be focusing a lot on what it means to ask a question, and not just to reply with information about ourselves. This will take practice and time, but it's a valuable skill! Mrs. Morgan sure can sing! She shared that she loves to sing and then taught us a fun new song! (About flies--hence the scratching motion seen in the photo). :-) Next week, some of our "specials" teachers and other staff members will be invited in to share. I want students to know many of the other adults at Blair and to feel welcome in our school community. |