Literacy - Teach it the Kindergarten Way

Here is link for our recent webinar - Literacy - Teach it the Kindergarten Way:

click here to download the recording.

Join Capstone Professional authors Molly Cochell and Laura Fullmer for a 30-minute webinar chock full of lessons and activities for your kindergarten classroom. Learn how Molly and Laura use the social and active nature of young learners as a springboard for literacy learning! As a kindergarten teacher, you know that a child's first years of school should be engaging, active, social and fun! Yet you most likely feel the pull - challenged to nurture the holistic, exploratory nature of early childhood while teaching with the rigor required for meeting ever-higher literacy standards. Molly and Laura will present their strategies for keeping the play in kindergarten literacy. You will hear their strategies for each stage of the kindergarten year; Building a Literacy Foundation, Engaging in Reading and Writing, and Reading and Writing with Purpose. In this webinar they will share with you a sample of their activities for engaging kindergartners in literacy. See how the authors of English Language Arts the Kindergarten Way use their classroom-tested lessons to help young learners meet literacy goals by building on children’s innate desire to be speakers, readers, and writers.

Create a puppet character

Have your children create a puppet character and watch writing soar!

Writing about our Playground

We read several of Donald Crew's books and talked about them as mentor texts.

          

We decided that Donald Crews must like transportation vehicles!  We supposed that he observed the places where the vehicles were to get more information to write.  He must have looked at the vehicles and listened to them.  We also noticed that he used a few words and that he placed the words at the bottom of the page.  He also liked to use colors and details in his illustrations.

For our writing piece, we chose chose a place that we loved at school - the playground. First, we observed the playground and took some notes about what we saw, what we heard, and the actions that took place there.  I took a picture of the students on the playground. Later, they wrote sentences about what they saw, what they heard, and what actions took place at the playground.  They glued their black and white photograph to the top of the large writing paper.  They added color to their picture and extended the playground to the entire space.

For some additional fun and learning, we designed a playground for an ant a few days later. I showed the children a few ways to fold paper to make it 3D.  They took off on the idea and added many ways of their own.  

 

 Enjoy!   Molly

Measure Me!

With Spring here we have been growing sunflowers (see earlier blog), sorting seeds, and comparing heights and lengths.  It's a good time to introduce non-standard measurement activities.  Last week we measured many classroom objects - scissors, pencils, glue sticks . . .  But, the very best kindergarten measuring activity was measuring each other.  What fun!

The children measured each other and recorded how many cubes long the parts were on a body picture (feel free to copy the page below if you'd like to try it).  I left it open to see what they would like to measure. They measured feet, head width, ear length, mouth width, hand length, leg length and even body length!  They giggled and laughed during measuring, but turned into serious mathematicians when recording:)  It was time to end math even before they were finished.

Enjoy!  Molly

Feel free to copy recording paper here:  

Word Family Flowers

I was searching for ways to have children generate word family words.  I found this cute idea from Playdough to Plato http://www.playdoughtoplato.com/a-word-family-garden/ 

 But,  I am working with a whole class of kindergartners, instead of a small home setting.  So, I made a flower template and copied the flowers on bright colors.  We completed a lesson on word families, then I let them make their own word family flowers on their own.  This was a big task for some, but all children were successful.  I differentiated by the number of flowers and word families each child completed.

Here's a flower template if you'd like to try with your class too, feel free to copy it.

Enjoy!  Molly

Rainy Day Drip Art

Oh, rainy April Days!  No outside recess?  Here's what I did yesterday afternoon --drip painting.

I simply made up some thin paint by adding water to tempera and adding some to liquid watercolors to apply with droppers.  Then, I offered a padded tray and white construction paper to drip on.

They loved the break and our room came back to the excited hum of working kindergartners.

As we picked up each drip page, we sang "It's Raining, it's Pouring".  At another table, some children even used watercolor paints to try their own drips and one child made a page illustrating the song!

Over the next few days we'll cut large raindrops from the pages, write sound words, and perform some rain songs.

This lesson and many, many more is available in our Spring Weather lesson pack.

https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Spring-Weather-Kindergarten-Literacy-Activities-1141255

Enjoy!  Molly

Working with Peers - Math

     We are continuously trying to set up opportunities for children to work with each other.  I took a little look at how I am encouraging peer sharing in math lately.  Here's what I found:

This time of year, we are working on adding iconic or symbolic symbols to math thinking.  Each day, I ask children to share how they thought about a problem and to show their thinking.  In my classroom, this is usually done at the white board or easel with classmates sitting at carpet or at the document camera where all children have a white board or their journal to share.  With practice, we are getting better at listening to other's share and at sharing our thoughts.  I like to add a little more to think about to their work.  

We also try to work on problems together at our tables.  After writing or drawing, I sometimes ask them to take a moment to share their thoughts with someone sitting next to them.

After playing a game during math instruction time, I often leave the play materials for them to play more or develop new ways to play with each other.  Here children are trying out subtraction bowling and writing number sentences on their own!

These activities and more are available in our Understanding Addition and Subtraction Book.  Click on the caption for more information.

https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/A-Year-Full-of-Kindergarten-Lessons-for-Understanding-Addition-and-Subtraction-1617989

Enjoy!   Molly