This summer our classroom received a grant for 82 kindergarten level nonfiction books. This week we spent some time learning about our classroom library and previewing our new books to find out where they should go in our library. The classes sorted all 82 books into categories like "Books About Animals," "Weather Books," and "Jobs People Do." This lesson will help us to make the most of our classroom library and use it to find the books that we want to read. Many of our students are letter sound experts. We are working on stretching out words to hear all of the sounds in the words we are writing. We just stretch out the word as we stretch out our imaginary rubber bands and write down all the sounds we hear. This is why we need so many dry erase markers every year! We had an amazing Writers Workshop today focusing on not giving up when we have tough topics to write and draw about! All of the students in 203 practiced drawing and writing about a tough topic on their dry erase boards. They were so hard at work you could have heard a pin drop! This week we started learning about collaborative projects by building together with Legos. This group did an amazing job of working together to solve a problem! We will continue to work on building collaborative teams throughout the year. During these first weeks of school we have been reviewing letter sounds. As a part of this activity, we have been honing our fine motor skills by practicing letter formation. In kindergarten we try to help our students develop their fine motor skills in many ways, including writing. After reviewing the letters A and M and their sounds, we put on our letter vests and practiced blending words in the -am family. Our letters say their names out loud and we practice "sliding" the sounds down our arm to blend them together. This week our kindergarteners did an amazing job of labeling parts of a book using sticky notes. Students labeled the cover, the words, and the pictures on Wednesday. Some students even took on the challenge of finding the title and the author's name! On Thursday, we worked on more print concepts by identifying sentences in our books and magazines. We used sticky notes to label how many words we found in a sentence. This week we practiced Indpendent Reading. Last week we learned that there are 3 ways to read a book - read the words, read the pictures, and retell familiar stories. This week our beginning readers found comfy spots to practice reading on their own. We also opened our box of brand new books from Boundless Readers and learned how to find a book that is just right for us! When choosing a book to read, we found out that it is important that you are interested in the book and that you can use the words and pictures to understand what is happening in the book. Now we know that it is okay to put down a book if we aren't interested in it or if it's too easy or too hard! We introduced our Reading Response Notebooks to both kindergarten classes today! It was very exciting and all of the students did amazingly well! Today we practiced sorting pictures using different guidelines (animals and not animals; animals/plants/oddball). These sorts are part of the Words Their Way curriculum and are setting the stage for sorting rhyming words, sorting by first sound, and sorting by vowel sounds. We have also been working hard to establish classroom procedures like how to use the materials in our room. We're off to a great start! |
Mrs. McGrane
I love teaching kindergarten literacy at STEM! It is amazing to be a part of the reading and writing growth of a kindergarten student. You get to see kids move from knowing some letters and sounds to being enthusiastic readers and young authors. Archives
March 2016
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