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!
This week we launched our Science and Engineering centers by exploring some of the materials our classroom received through DonorsChoose.org projects. One essential aspect of our Science and Engineering centers are our STEM notebooks. At each center, students are presented with a design challenge. Before building anything, students sit down with their notebook and create a plan (through drawing and writing) showing how they plan to solve the design challenge. Students then use their drawing to create their solution, using the materials provided. Finally, students test their design and determine whether their design was successful or not. From here, the design process can begin again as students consider ways to improve their initial design.
Today was a really proud day for our kindergarten authors! To conclude our first Writer's Workshop unit, students worked hard to publish their stories - making sure that their illustrations and writing were just right to share with a classmate. Over the past week we have been revising our writing, adding more, and creating covers and titles for our finished works. Today students eagerly shared their stories with their classmates. It was a very proud moment - you can see the joy on their faces as they shared what they had done with each other. After they were finished, each person in their group asked a question or shared a compliment with the author.
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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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