Names, Names, Names! with a Freebie

I don't know about you all, but I LOVE LOVE LOVE teaching about names. There is no more authentic, engaging learning tool than each of your student's names!

We do name work for about the first month of school. My school does not teach "letters of the day" or "letters of the week," so letter work is integrated daily through learning from our names.

We start the year off with Star Students. Each student gets the "honor" for one day. This kiddo gets to do all the class jobs, be the line leader, and get a special sticker.

On this day, we also learn all about the kiddos name! I got a good part of our routine from this picture from Ketchen's Kindergarten and I made similar cards for my class. You can get those cards here.

The student is called up to stand in front of the class to help with their name work. We read a cute poem to start out Star Student called Everybody Has A Name.

**Say it: All students say the SS's name

**Cheer it: Spell SS's name in a cheer (Give me an S, give me an A...)

**Clap it: Clap the syllables in the SS's name (I often compare their name to previous SS)

**Count it: Count how many letters are in the SS's name

**Fix it: Write the kiddos name on a sentence strip, cut out each letter, and mix them up. My SS gets to choose friends to come up and fix their name. Then, we spell it together saying the letter names.

Then, the SS gets something very special. My kiddos watch me do a drawing of the star student. I talk about each body part as I add it. It is a great way to practice drawing people for writer's workshop later. Then, each of my kiddos go back and draw a picture of the SS. They all add their own little twists to it. We write the SS's name together on the paper to practice letter formation.

Then the SS gets to take home a book of all the pictures as a keepsake! Parents and kiddos love this!

After all of my kiddos get to be star student, they get to put their name up on the word wall. Can you believe I have 5 kids who have a name that starts with C?? 

We keep on trucking along by using tons of read-alouds to continue our name learning!

I'll update you more soon :)

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 :)