This week, students began buddy reading. As we move toward opening work stations (centers) and letting students choose their work for the day, we are slowly introducing each station and helping students understand what they should be doing at each center. This week, students practiced sharing a book with a partner and taking turns reading either the words or the pictures. Students thought that buddy reading was a good idea because it is fun and it helps us learn from our classmates.
This week, we began to explore word families, beginning with words with the -am ending. To start, we practiced blending sounds by sliding the sounds down our arms. We then used the Fridge Magnets function on our Smart Board to build words that end with -am. Students helped to generate words and then found the appropriate beginning sound or sounds to create the word they thought of. At this point in the year, we do a lot of discussion about the words, helping students to understand why some words "fit" in the word family and others don't (why jam and Sam fit, but man does not).
This week, students continued to learn about print concepts. Students were introduced to sentences as groups of words that share an idea. STudents were shown that all sentences begin with an upper case letter and end in a period (we will get into more end marks later). Students demonstrated how to look for the end of a sentence by finding periods in big books and in an online magazine. Students then practiced independently by looking for periods in their books and magazines. Students used highlighter tape to mark each period they found.
This week, students began thinking about print concepts. Students utilized online magazines and big books to identify pictures and words.
Hooray for an excellent first week of kindergarten at STEM! We had a great time in literacy, with the majority of our lessons focused on establishing rules and routines for the year. This week, students learned about independent reading and the three ways to read a book. Students learned that they can: (1) Read the words; (2) Read the pictures; or (3) Retell a familiar story. These ways to read a book help even emergent readers begin to explore books independently, which is one of the foundations of our balanced literacy program at STEM. During independent reading, students will practice the mechanics of reading as well as begin to utilize comprehension strategies that they are learning in class. Students did a great job of reading on their own and will be learning about other independent work that they can do over the next few weeks.
Kindergarten students were also introduced to their response journals this week. At STEM, we use response journals across subject areas and grade levels to keep a record of student work. Throughout the year, students will use these notebooks to record various activities that they have completed and to demonstrate their learning. Here, a student shows how they sorted picture cards into "Fruit" and "Not Fruit" categories (a sort from Words their Way). Throughout the year, students will continue to complete sort activities, sorting for attributes like rhyming words, initial sounds, and vowel sounds. We are so proud of the week our kindergartners had! To round out our exploration of environmental topics, this week we had some special visitors from Ms. Hall's third grade class. We learned about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (a huge area of the Pacific Ocean where currents have collected a massive amount of garbage) and tried to generate solutions for our own mini-garbage patches. Kindergarten students worked with a third grade partner to come up with a solution for cleaning up their tub of water. Students were allowed to "buy" materials from the teachers with the goal of coming up with an inexpensive, but effective solution for their polluted water. Students worked hard with their partners to try to make foil and plastic baggies into materials that could be used to clean their waters. Students used their materials to clean their water (with varying levels of success) and then took a gallery walk to see how other groups had tried to solve their pollution problem. Finally, students considered how well their solution worked and came up with ideas of how to improve their design. The students loved this activity and loved working with their third grade partners! Thanks to the author of the Beyond Traditional Math blog for this amazing idea!
This week as we were building our background knowledge about water as a natural resource, we started talking about how water can become polluted. We learned a little bit about how oil spills impact ocean life. Then things got a little messy as I asked the kindergartners to try their hands at cleaning up an (vegetable) oil spill. Students were armed with spoons and tried to scoop out the oil. We found that even though we kept scooping and scooping, we were leaving a lot of oil in the water. We also found that it was really hard to get just oil out - we were getting lots of water in our spoons, too. After our exploration, we talked about how hard it is to clean up pollution in the ocean and what that means for ocean life.
Hooray for these kindergarten readers! After reading a book called Games, we created a web to show what the author wanted us to learn about games. We then did some shared writing to create a sentence that told the main idea of the book. I am so proud of the great thinking and writing of this group!!!
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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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