This week our guided reading groups focused on developing fluency. Different groups focused on different strategies, but all groups developed their fluency by reading a story more than once. Here you can see students reading together, practicing one-to-one correspondence. Other students created flash cards for key vocabulary and then found those words in the context of the story. Another activity for a different group involved identifying unfamiliar words in their reading and using highlighter tape to mark those words. With this group we focused on strategies for reading long and unfamiliar words.
This week was really exciting for our kindergarten students. We are embarking on mini inquiry projects. Since introducing our Wonder Books, students have been working hard to identify wonders. It has been really remarkable to see kids talking about their thinking. We have been hearing kids talk about their wonders everywhere we go. Our next step was to narrow our wonders down to a big umbrella topic so that we could begin a mini research project. A lot of our students were wondering about the human body, so we decided to make that our topic. Over the past two weeks, students have used our time in the school library to read books on topics like organs, the 5 senses, earaches, and exercise to generate questions about the human body. We also used our time in the Dell Lab to visit kidshealth.org to learn more about then body. After coming up with lots of questions, I asked students to identify the one topic that they want to learn most about. Next week, we will put students into groups and begin researching our chosen topics. We can't wait to get started! This week we used sound boxes to make words in the -ab word family. We changed the sound in the first box to generate new words like lab, dab, and tab. Some students were even able to use their first box to make words with blends, like crab (cr/a/b). This week was really exciting in kindergarten! As we entered the last week of working on our Teaching Books that we have been writing, students used a checklist to think about what they've been doing a great job with and what they could improve in their work. After we went over the checklist, each student picked one "fix up" goal and went back to their book to add more or make changes. It was very exciting to see our kindergarteners thinking about their work and how they could make it better! |
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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