Today we worked on our first weekly assessment in Literacy. Each student was asked to write about the beginning, middle, and end of the story The Kissing Hand. Here you can see what an amazing job the students did. Olivia's drawings show exactly what happened first, next, and last in the story. Aarna did a wonderful job of writing about some of the details, saying that at the beginning "He [Chester] cry." In the middle of the story, Aarna notes that "His mom kissed his hand." And finally, "He [Chester] went to school." I am so proud of how well our kindergartners are doing and how well they are able to share what they have learned. We are really getting much more confident in our abilities to express what we are thinking in writing!
Today we started building words using our letter vests. This week we are learning to blend words that end in -ab (tab, lab, etc.). We "slide" the sounds together on our arms to decode the word. After the minilesson, students practiced writing their own -ab words using dry erase boards! This week for Social Studies, each student was asked to draw a picture that told something about themselves. Students were then asked to use some writing to tell about their picture. While many of our students aren't writing yet, they are making great attempts to spell phonetically. Sean did this amazing picture of his family playing croquet and spelled "ROKTA" - using a lot of the sounds he hears in the word "croquet!"
Today we learned more about print concepts by examining sentences. First we highlighted sentences on our SmartBoard. (We read articles found in National Geographic Young Explorer - http://ngexplorer.cengage.com/ngyoungexplorer/readstory.html - if you're interested.) Next we used highlighter tape to highlight sentences in our Independent Reading books. We searched for sentences by looking for words that begin with upper case letters and followed the sentence all the way to the end by looking for a period. Both classes did such an amazing job that I'm nearly out of highlighter tape. It was wonderful to see them so excited to practice the strategy we had learned together! This week in writing, we are working on using upper case letters when we spell the names of our friends. We practiced by drawing a few friends from our class and writing th |
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
Categories |