One (Kind) Kindergarten

Hello friends! Week seven is all planned and we have communities, asking and answering questions, research writing, describing different types of jobs, finishing our initial alphabet introduction, and counting in different arrangements within seven all up this week!

Reading:
Text suggestions: Clothesline Clues to Jobs People Do, Whose Tools Are These?, Building with Dad, ABC Firefighters, Maybe Something Beautiful: How Art Transformed a Neighborhood

We will continue to work on asking and answering questions before, during, and after reading. This week, I will be assessing student ability to ask and answer questions using a checklist. However, this week we will use our questions to guide research projects about different jobs in the community. I have selected doctors, firefighters, construction workers, and artists for us to study based on student interest.


Asking and answering questions within texts is a hard skill for kindergartners. Differentiate for your non-verbal students by providing them with cards that represent questions and answers. For example, vocabulary cards that have community helpers on them will be helpful if you want students to infer from the text which helper uses the tools.

Writing:
We will use videos, a class guest speaker, and multiple texts in order to guide our research exploring new jobs. Students will use these experiences and sources to create daily writing pieces. I want them to be reflective about where they got their information, so I've added a place for them to circle where they got their information from. You can download these writing pages here.

Mathematics:



We will be counting in different arrangements 0-7: students should be able to count in a circle, line, array, or scatter. Download the quick assessment pictured above by clicking the link. We will continue to link creating number symbols using quick writes such as this Count and write Powerpoint(click to download).


Our math tasks for the week will revolve around a chef planning for a catered event. I have a launch that includes brainstorming ideas about a catered food picture that you can use to prime student's thinking. What types of math does a chef use? What do they need to count?

Step one is pictured above, and is intended to build on student knowledge of counting in different arrangements. Which arrangement will be easiest to count? Which arrangements would seat all seven people? Step two is planning materials, and step three is a counting and representing problem. Have students discuss and represent their thinking at each step! I kept numbers under seven. These tasks are intended to encourage depth and conversation, and are easily edited to suit your student's needs.

Chef Math Tasks

Happy teaching!

xo

Ms. M

Happy week six of kindergarten! I actually plan these a week ahead of time, so I'm about to head into week five with my little loves. However, planning ahead has me SO excited for what this week will bring...

I have a favorite book when it comes time teach asking and answering questions, and it's Jon Klassen's This is Not My Hat. I love the simple illustrations and the creativity a reader is able to have based on what information they bring to the text. There are three vocabulary words I will pre-teach and highlight throughout the week: stole, notice, and belong.

I actually DON'T read the book the first day I teach questioning, because my students need to practice questioning first in a more familiar context. Asking and answering questions in your second language can be tricky, and many other of my student's first languages have a different structure to questions altogether. The first day, I will introduce the skill with a "mystery bag." Inside I will hide an everyday object, and they will ask questions to determine what is inside!

We will then practice the skill whole group, answering wh questions using the following resource on the SmartBoard: All About School WH Questions

Day two, we will review the skill and fill in the first third of this chart. Just from the title page and picture walk, what questions do we have about this text? I will think-aloud, and record any student questions as well. I will repeat this process for the next two days, as we re-read and create questions during reading and after reading the text.

Students will practice drawing to answer a question about a text--we will start with questions we have rehearsed answering such as "Who are the characters?" and share with a partner before recording our ideas in our journal. We will end the week with drawing to answer the main question of the text--WHAT HAPPENED TO THAT LITTLE FISH? I couldn't be more excited to teach this strategy with this text!

Writing: 
I am going to model one-to-one voice and print correspondence, which is writing production standard in my state. I plan to begin modeling writing with my students whole group. I want to teach each lesson twice: once with teacher modeling, and once with students writing dictated or interactive writing. My two lessons this week are: counting your words before you write, and re-reading what you wrote to make sure you didn't leave anything out. Day one they will see a model and begin to interact with the model, and day two of each lesson cycle they will finish the interactive part and go independently write. My students still require a lot of support and repetition, so I think this slowed gradual-release model will serve them best at this point in the year.

Mathematics:
Number writing! I don't have anything truly mind-blowing here. We will be matching numbers to quantities and doing a ton of handwriting practice so students feel confident in their ability to represent things with a number.

I will be emphasizing that numbers are a huge part of communication--we may even go on a "number walk" in the school to find examples of written numbers!

SEL:

We are on to lesson four of the Choose Love curriculum, which tackles how to deal with difficult feelings such as anger and frustration. The curriculum uses the sweetest video from Sesame Street:


I will be supplementing our SEL curriculum with I Feel Silly! by Jamie Lee Curtis, yoga from Cosmic Kids, and positive affirmations. I have a lot of kids who don't like themselves and have low self-confidence. Our transitions will be used to affirm ourselves and our abilities!

I rearranged my schedule a little bit this week. I am finding that I need to use my time after lunch as my writer's workshop time, rather than before. I am going to try out this schedule this week, and see how they progress. Wish us luck!

Reading: Our theme this week is fairytales. I chose Goldilocks and the Three Bears and Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs as our two anchor texts this week. The latter is also an anchor text recommended by my district, but it is harder to appreciate if students are not familiar with the original story!

Using these texts, students will work to retell the major events of a story. Many fairytales have clear cut events, and are a good starting place for work with this standard.

Day one we will retell the story whole-group, using puppets. I will introduce the concept, and heavily support students verbal retelling. Day two, small groups will use storyboards to retell the story after the re-reading, and we will share out. I will offer less support for these retelling. Day three, students will use pictures from the story to sequence and orally retell, while day four I will assess their retelling with their independently created story maps.

Free Resources-
https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Goldilocks-and-the-Three-Bears-Sequencing-Assessment-Reading-Street-44-1093784
https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/FREE-Goldilocks-and-the-Three-Bears-1705774
https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Story-Boards-Set-8-The-Three-Little-Pigs-Goldilocks-and-the-Three-Bears-1194112

Writing: There are two major lessons I want to instill in students this week: one, that authors use letters, words, and sentences in their stories (and those are different!). And two, building writing stamina by working the whole time. I'm not using anything fancy this week, but I will be introducing their journals and making an anchor chart whole group. I want to get back to what I LOVE about writing instruction. I really feel I've been unable to fully teach writing how I want to since I was a student teacher.

Idea from Kindergarten Chaos



Free Resources-
https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Letter-Word-Sentence-Sort-2235576'

Phonics: I am still introducing letters and doing basic oral blending and oral rhyming activities. We will map and practice handwriting for letters P, Q, R, S, and T this week!

Mathematics: This is the introduction to counting, and the beginning of the first counting unit, which will take approximately three weeks to complete. This week, I just want to build one-to-one correspondence with numbers 0-7. (Yes. 7. That is provided to me by my district). I will build conceptual understanding of this through reading texts such as Mouse Count and 10 Black Dots, and having discussion about number. We will also continue our daily number talk routine, moving through the provided sequence of dot patterns in the Number Talks book by Sherry Parrish. Our culminating math task with be the three act task linked below. I LOVE this task because it really helps students to connect with the concept that the last number stated is the answer!
Dotty


Social/Emotional Learning: I will continue with the Choose Love campaign, lesson three! Lesson three is entitled "Feelings can change!" and I am really looking forward to discussing strategies with my students.


That's all for this week, happy teaching!

Ms. M

I love to create behavior interventions that kids are excited about! This one I created for a Mario-loving friend. For each part of our day he meets his goals, we color in a coin. If he earns 3 or more coins, he gets a 5 minute reward during our dismissal time (iPad, playdoh, blocks...something simple!)

I chose to make this black line so we can start fresh with a new copy each day. His mom wanted me to keep in communication about how he was doing at school, and this makes it easy for her to see how he is doing during the day!

Bonus: make a ton of copies, and put them in a pronged folder. The child is then responsible for carrying this folder during transitions (to specials for example). This keeps his hands occupied in the hallway!


The download is fully editable so you can change the goals, subject areas, and even how many coins they need to earn (I recommend to start low, and gradually increase the threshold as their behaviors improve!)

Mario Point Sheet

Hello friends!

I just finished my plans for week four of kindergarten! Phew. I like to plan a full week at a time to encourage myself to make cross-curricular connections and have a even flow of learning. This week was difficult because there is a TON of content, but only four days of school! I had to juggle some things around to keep myself on track.

You will notice on my plans, I don't list guided reading or centers. I keep those plans separate from these. I have about 50 minutes per day to dedicate to guided reading and centers.

Read-aloud and Writing:

It is family and home week! We will be reading about all different kinds of families, and students will be making their own family book. I am using a free resource that comes in several different levels (link is at bottom of post!). The level with the fewest lines is still too much for my kiddos, but I am going to encourage them to try it and there is plenty of room for me to dictate this way! I am so excited to have these done by open house so they can read them to their families.



Science:

We have a dedicated 25 minute science/social studies block. We are launching this week with our first full-on science EXPERIMENT! Because I didn't want to deal with REAL worms, we will be watching an in-depth video about worms (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-zc_1vjLnI) and then I will send them to their tables to examine gummy worms. I will NOT state that they are gummy worms. I want to lead them to DISCOVER the concept of living vs. nonliving. We will discuss and then I will provide the vocabulary. The five components they are supposed to know about living things is they need "food" (grade level appropriate for nutrients), move on their own (this will be fun with plants--we will talk about root movement/bending to the sun), reproduction (...), needing water, and "breathing" or needing oxygen. As we discover these concepts, I will keep an ongoing list. We will end the week with each child getting a picture of a living or nonliving item, sorting it, and justifying their choice.

Mathematics:

Phew, four days to teach positional words and three-dimensional shapes! I have tried to put a few activities in for these each day. Some of our tasks come from this amazing pack (link at bottom). The one below we will practice all together to begin to get a routine of how math tasks should look and feel in the classroom! However I also have a ton of total physical response planned for position words--each child getting a cup and bear and hiding them, putting hands all of the places (above, below, next to, beside, under, on, etc.) and then doing the same thing with FEET (it gets very silly). We will also do a 3D shape hunt by cutting out magazine photos.



Social/Emotional Learning:

We are all special and different human people, and we will share more about ourselves during morning meeting times this week. However, we will mainly be focusing on lesson two of our Choose Love Curriculum, which is about having the courage to share your feelings. We will be playing a TON of feeling charades, sharing feelings, and practicing calm-down strategies. We will illustrate a feeling ourselves, and I hope to get pictures of the students for a class feelings book made this week. We will get out our calm-down kit and practice it all together a few times. Practice makes perfect!



Please see the links below to find these resources, and let me know any questions or suggestions you have!

xo,

Ms. M


Free resources:
Learn more about the Choose Love Movement, and check out the (free) lesson plans!
https://www.jesselewischooselove.org/
https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Objects-in-the-Environment-Math-Tasks-and-Exit-Tickets-2983013
https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Living-and-Nonliving-Things-for-Kindergartners-2429520
https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/All-About-My-Family-Writing-Book-Template-for-K-2-FREE-2932909
https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/12-3-A-Calmer-Me-Self-Regulation-Calming-Strategies-3110932

In my last post, I shared some whole-group name-games I have picked up over the last couple of years. However, students also have to learn to read and write their names as quickly as possible when they get back to school!



Here are some of my favorite classroom routines and activities we use to get name writing!

1. Dry-erase sleeves: Download a tracer font, and write their name several times on a piece of paper. This is re-usable and can be done whole-group. After we practice it several times and they know how to use the dry-erase markers, this becomes the very first activity at writing center!

2. Trace their name with items/paint: Write their name on a half piece of construction paper. They can cover it up to write their name with small stickers, bingo daubers, or q-tips and paint depending on what you have on hand. These become easy first art projects to hang up in the classroom and display their names!

3. If you are brave...You can also do the above with cereal or small ripped pieces of paper. Depending on your students, you can allow them to use the glue or you can walk around with a bottle and have them do one letter at a time.

4. Rainbow Tracing: I make them a tracer page with their name written seven times. We watch each color song on YouTube in rainbow order. We listen to the song for the letter red, everyone holds up their red crayon, and we trace our names in red. We repeat for all other colors or as long as their attention is held!

5. Pocket Chart: I make a set of all their names on sentence strips. I put one set of the full class names at the Pocket Chart center with cards that say "I am" and a "." for the end. They can build "I am (Michelle)." and repeat for all their friends names. Then they can take turns being "teacher" and reading the sentences.

6. Tweezers: Using a sentence strip, you can provide them with plastic tweezers and they "trace" their name with cereal, cotton balls, buttons, pom-poms, or anything else small. This helps them build their hand muscles to better write their names! This is a good first work work center to start the year as well.

7. Name Puzzles: There are good templates for this on TPT, but it is just as simple to write their name on a sentence strip and cut apart each letter yourself! Then they take it apart and put it back together. I give each student a box that has their name puzzle, and magnetic letters to build their names, as well as a laminated sentence strip they can use as a guide.

8. Chicka-Chicka Boom Boom: Get foam letters and have them stick them on a coconut tree craft you make after reading the story. I pre-place letters that will be needed for the names in a bag by table--for example, if I have "Lucy", "Meg", "James", and "Quentin" at a table, their letters will all be mixed in one bag. This way they still have to search for the correct letters, but it is less time-consuming and frustrating!

9. Post-it-Note Puzzle: Make them a name puzzle with post-it notes. They can build their names, or stick the letters on an ABC line to begin to identify the letters in their names!

10: Fun-stuff!: Think about what you have around already in your classroom and let them build their names: sand, salt trays, colored rice can be placed in bins. Play-doh is fun if you teach them how to roll it out and create letters! Any small manipulative (mini-erasers are perfect for this!) you have on hand you can place at a table, give them a name-tag or sentence strip to use as a guide, and let them explore! You can rotate materials between tables and create your first center rotation with this early in the year.


Happy name writing!

Ms. M

Hello friends! Every week, I pick a social-emotional learning focus for my class. This week, my big idea was been building a sense of belonging: and the skill we focused on was using names when addressing others. Are you working on names and name recognition in your class? Here are a few of my FAVORITE whole group activities for the first week or two.



These are a great way to get all students using the names of others in your class, and are fun for morning meeting or any time!

1. Who Stole the Cookies from the Cookie Jar: Have all students chant/sing. When you get to the end, have the student say the name of the person sitting next to them and repeat!

"Who stole the cookie from the cookie jar? (Michelle) stole the cookie from the cookie jar! Who me? Yes you! Couldn't be. Then who?"

2. In the Box: Have a child in the middle of the circle. Ask them if you can cover them up with a box, blanket, jacket...something you have available! (Some student will not want to be covered up. I always give them a choice. They can either skip their turn OR just not be covered up when it is their turn.) All students chant: "(Michelle) in the box...sits so still. Will she come out? Yes she will!" At the end, pull off the box to reveal the student popping out! Repeat for all students.

3. In the Middle: Each child gets a turn to be in the middle! I have heard several variations of this chant/song, here is mine! "(Michelle), (Michelle), (Michelle) in the middle! Let me see you dance, let me see you wiggle! Turn around, now sit back down!" Repeat, replacing student names. I always offer to go in the middle with anyone who is shy. If they don't want to dance in the middle, I still have the other children sing their name.

4. Bumble Bee: I carry a small object "bee" around the room and sing the song. When it lands on the students head, they just say their name! This one is great for a first game because it is simple. Teacher:"Hicket-pickety-bumble-bee, who can say their name for me?" Student: Michelle!

5. Willoughby-Wallaby-Woo: I sing the song (you can find the tune on Youtube!) and we replace each students name with /w/ for the beginning sound! I also carry around a small elephant toy and place it on each students head as we sing for extra fun. "Willoughby-Wallaby-Woo, An elephant sat on you! Willoughby-Wallaby-(/W/ichelle!), and elephant sat on (Michelle!)

6. Name clapping: It's as simple as it sounds. We go around the circle, clapping syllables of each students name. We do each child three times: one at a normal volume, once shouting, and once at a whisper.

7. Jack-be-nimble: I put this poem in a pocket chart, and use a small object as a candle-stick! We read the poem, replacing "Jack" with a student name. That student gets to go jump over the candle stick when its their turn! "(Michelle) be nimble, (Michelle) be quick! (Michelle) jumps over the candle-stick!"

We just finished up week two of kindergarten this past Friday! I always spent weeks two and three focusing on student names--both recognition and writing.  Most of my students come in unable to write their names, but sticking down name plates on their tables my first year drove me crazy--they were pricey to buy with reference materials on them, it was time-consuming tape them down, and then I would turn around to find they have picked at them and the tape was peeling up! We also eat in the classroom so they also become a magnet for food crumbs and spills. Halfway through first semester, I ripped them off the tables and had to scrape off the residue. Nightmare!

Last year, I got a pack of labels from the Dollar Tree, wrote their names on them, and hot-glued them on top of their pencil boxes--this saved so much trouble. They were away when they needed to be, accessible when they needed to be, and didn't get destroyed or covered in food! I ended up loving how it worked out, so this year I decided to design labels that were a little cuter and offered some other reference materials kiddos might need at their seats
I laminated a class set, and just wrote their names in Sharpie once I got my roster. I work at a high-motility school, so whenever a child leaves, I can write over the name in dry-erase marker to erase and re-use the whole nametag rather than creating a new one! To attach this year, I used velcro dots. I put one on each corner of them this year, and it works extremely well. While hot glue occasionally pops off and needs re-glued, these can be easily stuck back on in a second! You can also easily remove or switch out nametags this way if needed.

Overall, I am loving how these are working out in my classroom, and I especially love that the alphabet is readily available for my kiddos at their seats, not just up on the word wall or ABC line.  If you want to try them out for yourself, click the link below for the download:

Download Pencil Box Nametags Here!


Enjoy!

Ms. M