Peek at My Week 9/30

The Little Red Hen was a huge success last week! I could not believe how excited my littles got everyday when I told them we were reading it again :)

This week, our anchor text is The Three Little Pigs!

 

I will post pictures from our adventures with the Three Little Pigs later this week!

 

Here are my plans :)

 

 

Be sure to link up with Mrs. Wills Kindergarten for a Peek at Her Week!



Peek at My Week! 9/23

Oh my word! It is so amazingly wonderful to sign onto my beautiful blog now :) It just makes me so happy!

So my little babies have been learning all about their names the last few weeks to the point of Miss M going crazy, BUT I am happy to say that 18/18 can now recognize their own and 16/18 can write it! (This is truly an accomplishment!)

This week we are starting our unit on Emergent Storybooks and learning the power of reading pictures and retelling stories! My ELA curriculum does not allow direct instruction of letters, but I think having a weeklong anchor text is going to help me wiggle this rule a little :)

This week our anchor text is The Little Red Hen!

I am starting with this story because not only is it an awesome story for shared reading and retelling, but it is also a wonderful lesson on being a good friend! (Something my babies DESPERATELY need.)

We will start our is, can, has chart on the first day and continue to add to it throughout the week. I love this cute chart from Conversations in Literacy!

I also love this poem about the things a hen can/can't do. We love poems in my class and this will allow them to be creative and make a class book!

We will be making our own little red hens and be super helpers ourselves! Each child will think of how they can be a "helper" and we will write it on their hen. It's based off of this pinterest idea that I cannot find the link back to! If it's you, let me know!

We will be making this adorable little craft that I found  from Fairy Dust Teaching. I couldn't find the actual link on her page, but I wanted to give credit where credit is due! My kiddos will be using this as rhyming practice and first letter/sound correspondence.

I'm super excited to be starting literacy stations this week (for real). We're mostly just going to be practicing the games, but it's exciting to see small group work on the horizon now!

Here are my visual plans, linking up with Mrs. Wills Kindergarten!

Here they are! They are a little different this week since I am starting to really implement literacy and math stations! Enjoy :)

There are quite a few activities for this week from my Oh What Fun! K.CC.A.1 pack. It is really great for the beginning of kindergarten when kiddos are building that initial number sense.

There are also many games from my new pack (coming soon!), Fallin' For Fall! I'm just using the ones that are already finished for my kiddos :)

Five for Friday (for once!) and Freebies!

I always take the pictures and tell myself I am going to participate in Doodle Bug's Five for Friday, but I always come home dead to the world on Friday nights!

So I'm super excited to be participating this week :)

 
Every morning (except Fridays), we do one of DeeDee Wills' Read, Trace, Glue, and Draw activities as our morning work. It is amazing! No more, Miss M, how do I do this? EVERYONE knows what to do. I can't wait until they can actually read it :)

Our kindergarten assessments this year were re-made to reflect the CCSS better, and that means they are harder! My kinder babies are expected to know a lot, including word problems (boo!). So, we used this farm scene from my Oh What Fun! K.CC.A.1 math pack to help us practice our mathematical language.

I would dictate a scene to the students, like "There are 5 horses in the barn" or "There are 3 chickens on the roof" and they had to show me on their farm scene. Next week, they are going to practice making up stories for each other. This will naturally lead into addition and subtraction word problem practice!

After our whole group practice, we did math tubs. I am trying REALLY hard to implement the ideas/techniques I got from Debbie Diller's math work stations book. So my kiddos and I work together to make charts of what they must/can do at each math tub. (Side note: Making the charts is a lot more work than I thought...but when I tried to skip them, it was chaos. I need to stick with it!) Here is the chart we made for our Roll and Color game. And another of the kiddos playing :) You can get the game for free here!

For reading, my class does a reader's workshop routine, which we call "me" time and "we" time. We have actually gotten really strong at "me" time (our independent reading) but the kiddos worked really hard to be "we" time (partner reading/table reading) experts this week! Look at these intense readers!

Even though most of my kiddos do not have the letter sound or sight work knowledge to actually be reading their books yet, they are very focused on reading the pictures! Even so, I wanted to give them something to build their confidence in reading the words. So the song book was born! This thing has been a favorite since day 1! They LOVE it!

I put the lyrics to any song that we sing in class in their songbook that they may read during our reader's workshop. We have especially been loving the color songs from Frog Street Press. I have made a freebie lyric page for all of the color songs that you can use here :) These songbooks are amazing for practice with one to one correspondence.

Since our stamina is not quite built up to a full fledged reading workshop, we are also starting to learn literacy station games to build up to actually having literacy stations. And to do that, we have been playing name games. I know I'm not doing anything new and different that you haven't seen before, but these games are working for my kiddos!

 

(Sorry for the shiny lamination picture)! This game gives the students practice writing their friend's names. On the large name, it also has a picture to help the kiddos build their letter/sound correspondence too!

This game has a card with each child's name on the front and their picture on the back. Then, they use the letter cubes to build the name of their friend.

This game has envelopes with each child's name and picture on the front. Inside, their name is cut up into pieces and the student has to put them back together.

After playing our games, we came back together whole group and made an ABC order list of our names.

In writing, we are working on adding details to our pictures (Lucy Caulkins). Obviously, my kinders have no idea what "details" means, so I did a little activity to show them! We made "1," "2," and "3" pictures.

A "1" picture is a picture with no color. It was rushed and does not look nice. There are scribbles.

A "2" picture is a picture that has a few colors. The illustrator spent a little more time on it, but it is still not their best work.

A "3" picture is your best work. It has tons of colors, all pictures colored in, background, and more. It is what all of our pictures should look like.

We went into a lot of discussion about how the pictures need to be detailed to help the reader understand our story. We hung them up on the wall and I reference them all the time!

Right now, we are learning about seasons in science. We have just finished up our unit on summer. We ended with making our own summer person. We talked about the types of things we wear in the summer and what we look like.

This little guy cracks me up. The bottom of his face is red because it is "burnt" and he has blue spots all over his body because he is "wet." So cute!

So this is a few more than 5 pictures...oops! Enjoy your weekend and I'll have my visual plans posted tomorrow :)

Peek at My Week! (Late sorry!)

I have grad school classes on Monday and Tuesday so it is SO hard to force myself to do anything else (like working out and blogging) when I leave my house at 7:30 am and get home at 8:30 pm. AHH!

So here is my short post and my visual plans for this week :)

Have a great week :)

Calm from the Crazy!

I'm so glad that I got to spend a relaxing weekend at home because my kiddos were crazy last week! It was like we forgot everything we learned the first 3 weeks of school. However, over a bottle of wine, I regrouped and am starting fresh for this week!

If you didn't notice (how could you not!), I just got my blog redesigned and I could not be happier! Becca from Jumping Jax Designs did such an incredible job on this blog. She was super easy to work with and I got everything I wanted! And another upside to working with Becca, is that for her quality of work, the cost was very affordable. Check out her portfolio!

Next, I have another e-book review for you. This one is AMAZING. I'm telling you my kiddos absolutely loved it.

I had the opportunity to review Mary had a Sleepy Sheep by Julia Dweck with my class and they thought it was hysterical. We have read this story multiple times and it's just as funny every time. It's about a little girl and her sheep who is so sleepy no matter what she tries to do to wake him up. And she tries some pretty crazy things! You'll have to purchase it and see for yourself how she finally keeps her poor sheep awake :) You can purchase it now on Amazon!

Lastly, I am linking up with Mrs. Wills Kindergarten for a Peek at My Week!

This week I am finally ready to let my little crazies kinders start actual math stations (aka not just exploring manipulatives). We were not ready and I'm still not sure if we are, but we're going to risk it!

I'm also making sure that I really try to make writing a priority this week. Unfortunately, my schedule has a huge block of reading and writing and it's a lot for my babies. By writing time, we've lost it no matter how many body breaks we get!

So I'm beginning with the end in mind to make math stations and writing my goals this week!

Here are my plans for this week:

Have a great week!

A Peek at My Week!

So I'm linking up with Mrs. Will's Kindergarten for A Peek at My Week, and I have to admit, this week looks A WHOLE LOT like last week...oops. I always have so much planned for my babies and I have to remember that it still takes us so long to transition from activity to activity. And I had so many extra lessons from principals, counselors, etc. that I missed a lot of my writing instruction.

So anyway, sorry if you see a lot of the same things! I like the activities I planned, I just haven't had a chance to do them yet! Our main focuses this week are colors and family :)

So here they are!

Make sure you stop by my blog in the next few days. It is getting a make-over! I'm so excited!!!!