Every year, some of my favorite lessons to teach involve visualization, when a reader uses clues from the text to imagine what is happening in the story. To do this, I read students The Lorax by Dr. Seuss and didn't show them the pictures. As we read, students used the words they were hearing and their schema to imagine what was happening in the story. The Lorax is an amazing story to support the visualizing process because the setting doesn't change. Students created the land with the truffula trees and changed their drawings as the story progressed. First, students drew a serene space with tons of trees, a pond, and a wealth of animals. As the story goes on and the Once-ler starts chopping down trees, and the animals have to leave, students changed their drawings. Here are a few students showing their illustrations of the Once-ler's factory once all of the trees have been chopped down.
Can kindergarten kids code? No doubt about it!!!
Throughout the country, many schools take part in the Hour of Code, developed to give children and adolescents a fun introduction into the process of writing code. This week, STEM Kindergarten gave coding a try with great success! Thanks to a project on DonorsChoose.org, our classroom received 2 Dash and 2 Dot robots from Wonder Workshop. Students practiced writing code to control Dash and Dot, helping the robots change color, move, and make sounds. I think our favorite was having Dash make kissing sounds! Students completed various challenges in record time, jumping in to coding with both feet! Some students even got to explore coding on the Hour of Code website and by using Foos, an amazing app on the iPad. Besides being fun, coding helps students develop their problem solving skills as they write code and then evaluate their code to see if they can improve upon their design! The Museum of Science and Industry is one of our favorite places to visit! It's a great place for STEM students and this trip we were lucky enough to get to see the Robot Revolution exhibit! Students enjoyed seeing all of the things that robots can do and imagined what they would have their own personal robot do. We loved seeing robots playing soccer, swarming, and even controlling some little robots. We also got a chance to do some coding in the exhibit. Who doesn't love a day with robots?
This week we started using Whisper Phones to help students begin to develop fluency as they read to themselves. Students hold the Whisper Phone up to their mouth as they read and the sound of their voice goes straight into their ears - helping them really take notice of how they sound when they're reading (choppy or smooth) and helping make errors more evident. Students use the Whisper Phones to read and reread their guided reading texts as well as books from their book bag.
Today groups 5 and 6 were introduced to the Magic (or Silent) e. Students learned that the magic e can reach over just one consonant and make a vowel say its name. We used sound boxes to try out the magic e on some different words and practiced reading the words with and without the magic e - taking special care to make sure that we used the right vowel sound, depending on whether magic e was tapping the vowel or not.
Many of our students are such experts and letters and sounds that we are becoming excellent spellers! Today we practiced using letter cards to review sounds. We built several words and then changed the vowel to see what new words we could make - hat, hut, hot, hit... Students did an excellent job of reading the new words once the middle vowel was changed!
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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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