Family Christmas Night

Each  year at our school, we have a special night dedicated to a celebration of the Christmas season. It is considered a literacy event because there is a reading of a Christmas book for the children and their families. At this reading, there is ALWAYS hot cocoa and cookies! After the story and snack, guests are taken on a tour of our elementary and kindergarten buildings. Why? You would think that they had all seen it by now! No, really, it's a tour of the buildings...all gussied up for the holidays!!!

This year, the theme of our family Christmas night is "Light Up the HALLidays." In the kindergarten building we always coordinate our decor so that our entire building is the same general theme. Last year, we were 'Gingerbread Lane,' and I promise you, it was super cute! We were a little stumped on our theme for this year. Other than hanging lights from the ceilings, how do you 'light up' classroom doors? Then, it was suggested that Rudolph has a bright and shiny nose...one that can light up the whole sky for Santa's sleigh...so, the birth of an idea began. So this year, we are Santa's Stable. The door to the kindergarten office shows Rudolph, leaping with excitement over Christmas Eve's rapid approach. Each classroom door is decorated as one of the other reindeer, with a description of that door's reindeer on display. Let me tell you, it is uh-'door'-able!!!

 Our door showcases "Prancer." 

Prancer is Santa's navigational expert! However, she is rather clumsy. I chose to have her tangled up in her holiday decor, with her compass dangling from her antlers. She also has her handy dandy map in hand, ready to fly on Christmas Eve!

Sick Day!

Today, I spent the day at home, taking care of my daughter. She was sick with an awful stomach bug! She lost her lunch (and everything else in her belly) 9 times during the night last night. Not good. While I was home (in between cleaning her up and getting her to take fluids), I worked on the unit that we will be beginning next week. I am excited to begin teaching writing in more depth and detail than ever before! High-lights of the next six weeks in literacy will include: events in a sequence, ordinal numbers, story sequencing, distinguishing between letter/word/sentence, and beginning sentences with a capital letter in the first word. We will still continue to work on letter recognition, primary sounds of letters, color words, sight words, nursery rhymes...basically everything that we have been doing...with more!

I also updated the "Blogs I Love" page. Check out some awesome teaching and learning blogs there!

We Can...

write our color words! My kinders are so smart that they have figured out that if they look around the room, they will find resources that can help them complete tasks. I have color words posted on the board, on the color wall, and they are also written out on the desk nameplates at each child's area. During 'down time' (which is very rare), the class loves to work with their marker boards (or to draw on the tables with our 'magic markers'). On this particular day, I told the class to work on spelling out the color words. They could sing the songs we have been learning to help them, or they could write from memory, OR they could find something in the room to help them out.

 And this it what it looks like when we clean up, after we use the markers! Baby wipes are wonderful things!!! I even use them to clean my chalk/dry erase board.

Journals

Journaling is such an important part of learning to write for a purpose. It is also very difficult to do with kindergarteners! Each year, I have struggled with the hows; whens; whats; and whys of journaling with pre-writers. This year, I am just biting the proverbial bullet and doing it.

So this is the journal that I bought. Actually, I bought 20.

It looks like this on the inside...perfect for the drawings and 'writing' of the kinders...

We have only journaled three times this school year. The first time, I wrote part of the entry for every student. It was related to the study that we were doing over The Itsy Bitsy Spider. I wrote "One day, ______ fell from the sky." The instruction was to draw a picture of something crazy falling from the sky and fill in the blank with a word to describe it. Some wrote 'houses,' 'pie,' 'cats,' 'mom;' you get the idea. 

For the last two weeks, we have been using 'Humpty Dumpty' and 'Jack and Jill' in our literacy activities. I had the students tell me how the nursery rhymes were similar. They agreed that all of the characters fell down. I asked them to think of a time that they had fallen down. They were to write a story or draw a picture of a time that they fell down. Were they hurt? Where were they? What caused them to fall? This was one result...

'Jack F. fell on rocks.'
Not to shabby for the 5th week of kindergarten!

Applying What We Learn

Amazingly enough, it is already the 5th week of school! At this point in the year in literacy, we have learned to recognize the letters Aa - Ff, as well as what sound each of those letters usually makes. We applied this knowledge in class on Thursday by writing each letter, and searching through magazines to find pictures of things that begin with the letter that we wrote. This is what it looked like: 

Happy 107th Birthday, Dr. Seuss and other literacy stuff :-)

Today would have been Dr. Seuss' 107th birthday! We had a fun day celebrating by wearing Cat in the Hat hats, making birthday cards featuring each child's favorite Seussical character ("zower in the shower" from There's a Wocket in my Pocket was the class favorite), reading books written by Dr. Seuss, and watching a video of Hop On Pop. I am featuring his books all week long, and the kids love it! It is a terrific author spotlight incorporating rhyming and reading with expression. They are really beginning to understand how much fun books can be when you read with feeling!

In February, we have been working on reading grade level texts and independently taking Accelerated Reader (AR) comprehension tests on them. The babies think they are hot stuff getting on a computer and making "5 out of 5 and 100%!"



Another activity we have had fun doing is working with magnetic letters on the ELMO. I call each child up and assign them a sight word. They rummage through my letter box to find the correct letters to spell their word. This is a hard game for some of them, but they always work hard to figure out the correct answers!



First try to spell "of"



2nd time's a charm!



Literacy Caravan Rescheduled!!!

As you may have read, I was very bummed to have had the flu when my day came to attend the literacy caravan. Fortunately for me, it was cancelled due to snow, and they did reschedule! Three other teachers and I went to the event on Friday. I had a blast! I know...I am a nerd.

The programs that I was able to see presented are....*drumroll*

Harcourt "Journeys"
Pearson "Good Habits, Great Readers"
Scott Foresman "Reading Street"
Mondo
Macmillan/McGrawHill "Treasures"

If you know anything about any of these programs, please speak up! I know which my favorite was, but I do have reservations about it (primarily that we have that particular company's math program and all of us hate it!). I would love to hear your thoughts if your school uses any of these!

Read All About It!

When the second semester begins at my school, kindergarten gets ready. Ready to read that is! This year, I am blessed with several 'natural readers' and several more that are 'eager readers.' I am so excited to be their teacher!

The natural readers have just picked up the necessary skills more or less on their own and were reading in August and September. The ones that I call 'eager readers' are the students who are just on the cusp and they know it! They are like race cars with engines revving in anticipation of the take-off. This week, three more have shot forward!

We have worked on blending phonemes for the last two weeks, and began working on CVC words in particular this week. Our focus is on the short vowel sounds for the most part, although the natural readers have begun working on silent /e/ and long vowel sounds. One activity that the class really enjoys is making their own mini-books. We have made two books for each short vowel sound.

In the beginning there is a sheet of paper. The babies illustrate (color) the story and then cut the pages apart. The next step is a bit tricky for them, as they must put the pages in order. If the book pages do not have page numbers on them already, we add them before cutting. When they have the pages in the correct order, I staple their book together. Finally, when all books have been assembled, the 'class reader' tells the story by decoding and reading the words. The final result is a bit like this...

Literacy Caravan

Today brought good news to my world! I would love to eventually be a literacy coach/specialist, and so it was with great excitement that I read the email telling me that I will be going to a 'literacy/reading caravan' in a couple of weeks. Now, I have not been to one of these before, so I am only assuming that this will be to choose our new literacy curriculum and texts for the next adoption. How fun! Yes, I know it is rather nerdly of me to be so overjoyed at choosing texts...but it is books...teaching materials...programs...scads of them to look over and see!

Thinking about the possibilities leads me to think about everything I will need to consider when perusing the materials available. Since our state is moving to Common Core State Standards for K-2 beginning with the 2011-2012 school year, it is important to identify materials and resources that correspond with those, while at the same time builds upon or correlates with those that we already use. Our current materials have been in place for at least eight years, possibly more, so they are definitely in need of updating...I hope that positive changes are coming for us in literacy!