A belated thank you to all of the parents who came out to spend Shadow Day with us! We had a great time and enjoyed having you with us to see a little of what we do everyday. I thought it might be helpful to share a little explanation of what you saw in my room. Each day, we begin with whole group mini lessons on strategies and skills that we are learning. The first activity that you saw in my room was phonemic awareness. We do a variety of phonemic awareness activities every day. Phonemic awareness is essentially playing with spoken words to begin blending and segmenting the individual sounds that make up words. Next, we did a word building activity using dry erase boards. For this activity I asked students to apply their letter knowledge to spell words from -am and -at word families. After mini lessons, students always use their work plans to choose a learning center. While students have choice in what center they go to, their work plan ensures that they are going to a variety of centers to reinforce the various skills they are learning. As we move into reading groups, these centers will be further individualized to meet student needs. On a typical day, the first center is followed by a comprehension mini lesson and a second center. While students are at their centers I am typically working with a small group of students on reading strategies. If you visited us in the afternoon, you also got to see students being introduced to their Wonder Books. Thank you so much for helping our kinder students get started on the inquiry process that we will be exploring this year. At this point, we are simply working on asking questions. Moving forward, we will learn about how we can use resources like books, videos, and interviewing experts to answer our questions. Eventually, we will move to students researching the answers to their questions and sharing their findings. We finished our shadow day with Writer's Workshop. During this time, students read their writing to a partner and the partner asked questions that could help them add details to their writing. Thanks again to those of you who were able to join us!
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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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