K1 Prep - 7/31/18

These K1 kids are getting ready for school to start in a few short weeks.  We've all mastered writing our name and some amazing things were happening in journals today.  Many kids took the lesson last week to heart and were able to draw a picture and label it in their journals.  I am so proud of them!

 We did a lot of math today.  We practiced counting to 100 and learned about the greater than and less than sign.  We talked about how it's a greedy alligator who wants to eat the most cookies possible.  We did a cut and paste activity and it really shows how solid of a number sense your child has - check their work in your backpack.  If it's not that great there is work to be done on the numbers 0-10.

The biggest lesson in reading today was b vs d.  That's a tricky one.  We made beds from our hands to be able to check if a printed letter is a b or a d.  Reference the picture in order to practice at home.

K1 Camp - Using Math to Facilitate Writing

Today in K1 prep we used our math lesson to facilitate our writing lesson. It's a math heavy week with concepts including patterning, graphing, and money/coins.  We started our writing and math lesson together by drawing patterns of color in our journals.  We then stretched the color names and wrote them down.

 We then moved into graphing.  I love to introduce graphing using the book "Ten Apples Up On Top!" or "Hats for Sale".  Both books show stacking multiple items (apples or hats) on top of a head.  I introduce graphing vertically first and draw a smiling face on the identifying picture.  We talk about how the face has to wear all the matching hats.  The hat can't be up high with empty space between it and the identifying picture because if I put my hat way up high it would just fall to the ground.  We use the SmartBoard to manipulate a handful of graphs and then turn to horizontal graphs. The concept makes a lot of sense to young kids.  They proved that they understood it by cutting and gluing their own practice graph.

 Everyone is doing fantastic with their reading.  I'm impressed with all the skills that are being practiced.  We're getting better at identifying letter names and sounds, we're gaining fluency with word families and sight words, and we're exploring reading books that are just right for our reading levels.

 At the end of the day we sang the ABCD Nursery Rhymes song, jumped while we counted to 100, and then worked on building patterns with unifix cubes.  Each child is borrowing 10 unifix cubes to build AB patterns at home.

Game Day in Kindergarten and First Grade Prep Camp

It was game day in kindergarten and first grade prep.  We're half way through our time together and it was time to spice things up.  After writing our names and jumping on the tramp we explored a few sections of Starfall.com We worked on individual letters, CVC words, and reading bigger books.

 We then split and worked on word families with half of the group and the other half worked on reading on their personal reading level.

 Our math game today was "Guess My Secret Rule" and just like I promised I pulled out the silverware drawer.  We started our game outside but then had to have a heart-to-heart about staying focused (it's really much harder outside) so we moved inside in order to complete our game.

 I put out three items with a matching attribute and a fourth item that doesn't match.  After playing with the silverware for a while we moved on to using the attribute blocks which are super convenient for this game.

Instead of writing individually in our journals today we wrote as a group.  We talked about how we can put words on the paper by stretching the sounds we hear to isolate the letters and then write one letter at a time on our paper.  We also talked about how if we don't know what a letter looks like we can go to the front of our journal and sing the ABC song while pointing at each letter.  We stop at the letter we're looking to write and the journal will show us what it looks like.

I think our game day spiced things up just enough to spark more learning!  I look forward to seeing you next week.

Summer Writing Workshop

Writing Workshop this afternoon was a whirlwind of awesome. We read a few of my favorite mentor texts, talked about storytelling and writing generas, explored fun conventions such as the ellipsis (...) text size/location and color, and explored different illustration options.  One of the books we read aloud was "Beep, Beep, Go to Sleep!"  It's a book where a little boy is putting three robots down to sleep.  The number of kids that related to the robots getting up multiple times made me hope for a more restful evening for all you parents out there!  We also read my number one favorite, "Rhyming Dust Bunnies".  There were two different versions written in writing workshop camp today.  With cute fuzzy dust bunnies and speech bubbles the book is hard to resist, plus it encourages a lot of giggling. 

 Our focus for writing workshop is on fiction writing and telling stories.  We talked about he main elements in a piece of fiction (characters, setting, problem, solution) and dissected the mentor texts as we read them aloud.  We played a fun game from "Tell Me a Story" where we rolled story cubes and had to fill in the blanks for a few story starters. We played with funny pairings of characters and imagined all sorts of nonsense.  The giggles were quite intense at this point in our discussion which led quite easily into what kind of stories we like to listen to and read - stories that make us feel an emotion, like happiness!

 Students then got to work putting their ideas down on paper in their sloppy copy or rough draft.  We worked out the kinks together however due to time constraints we didn't do too much illustration work in our sloppy copies. After a short recess break we pulled out the hard-backed books for kiddos that were ready to start working on their own real book.  We talked about the cover and how the first page is usually a title page.  I encouraged kids to start their story on the second page in.  We read through their rough drafts and added correct spelling where needed to make reading easier.  They all did amazing work in our time together and I hope they finish their books at home.  I encouraged them to send me pictures or video of their completed books.  You can post them over on our Facebook page at Facebook.com/InitiateLearning. 

It was a fast paced adventure in storytelling where we explored ways to make vibrant, innovative, powerful, and intriguing stories.  We looked for examples of crazy pairings in mentor texts and tried to add our own crazy twists into our stories.

Writing the Words we Say

As students are beginning to learn to write it's important to help them make the connection that they are saying words all day long.  When we write a word we are taking the sounds that our mouth makes when speaking and drawing the letters onto the paper.  Last week in K1 prep we began work in our journals by drawing our families.  We talked about how if you didn't write down who you drew then other people may not know.  We gathered together and worked out how to write the word Mom.  This is how that lesson went:

K1 Prep July 5th

I LOVED the second day of K1 Prep Camp.  It was amazing.  So many factors go in to why the second day of school is always better than the first.  We've all been together in a group, have been exposed to expectations, and are ready for routine to kick in.  We started off our day with writing, mostly because it's a fantastic skill that kids can get started on as they trickle in without missing a lesson.

Tip for your toolbox: Our young writers are still learning how to hold their writing tool correctly and the reality is that it requires an amount of fine muscle skills that develop just like other muscles.  They cramp and get easily tired.  Students that struggle often find that a crutch can help a ton to ease into the strength building while still having proper placement.  Use the lid of a marker or a small Lincoln Log inside the child's fist (last three fingers) while pinching the pen.  Have them hold the lid or Lincoln Log the whole time they are writing.  It works like magic if you're consistent and you'll find they don't need the crutch rather quickly.

 I wish you could all be a fly on my classroom wall.  In fact, I was telling this to my husband this evening.  There is a teacher side of me that is only brought out when a class is in a groove and would benefit from an incredibly over exaggerated teacher response. I'm dramatic.  And loud. And quiet. And, I tend to fall over and proclaim, "OH NO!  HE SAID HE CAN'T DO IT! That's what takes away super powers!" And then, do you want to know what happens?  Kids laugh, they think it's ridiculous, and they try the task at hand.  It ultimately makes the notion of "I can't do it" ridiculous.

 We had an awesome win in our writing today.  Using the concept of "Growth Mindset" we talk all day long about how we learn and grow by trying and sometimes making mistakes.  Our class is talking about drawing people.  The skill level varies and we have students drawing heads with stick arms and legs coming out of them all the way to students drawing amazing looking people.  We've talked about the shapes of our body parts (not sticks, rather circles and rectangles and ovals).  The sweet gal (pictured above) was really trying and when we conferenced we talked about how on the previous page the head took up the whole white space, so where would the body fit?  We talked about sizing and I offered a simple smaller drawing of a person.  I encouraged her to aim for that approximate size, and she did it!  We shared the success with the whole class about how sometimes we just need a little direction from a teacher and with some effort we can succeed. 

 We headed outside for snack, recess, and math.  We counted to 100 by ones and tens.  We used the 100 chart to talk about how we read two digit numbers.  The first is usually the number name followed by "ty" (think "forty") and then we say the second number in its usual way.

It appears that we don't have any pictures of our reading, but I sure got a lot of video of it.  After I pair it down I'll put together another post featuring some of our reading lesson.  We had an amazingly successful day.  Keep up the great work!

Welcome to Kindergarten and First Grade Prep Camp!

Kindergarten and First Grade prep camp was a whirlwind this morning.  We started off playing on the SmartBoard on Starfall.com.  If you've never used it I highly recommend their engaging games and activities.  Then we moved into how we can listen with different parts of our bodies.  We listen with our ears to hear sounds.  We listen with our eyes by looking at the eyes of the person speaking.  We listen with our mouths by keeping them quiet while we listen.  We listen with our hands by keeping them still.  We listen with our bodies by sitting respectfully with little wiggling.

Next we worked on an ABC and Nursery Rhymes song.  It mixes the two together and is great for phonemic awareness.  Hopefully we'll learn it well enough to post a video of it in a few weeks.  Then we split into groups and worked on reading.  Everyone was given a fairly difficult challenge at their own reading level.

 We were able to work on our journaling today.  The most important things we focused on was how to draw a person with more than just stick body parts.  We also wrote our names and talked about the correct way to hold a pencil.  When we went outside for snack time we played a fun game where I'd call out a letter sound and the kids would run to the paper and hand print paint it.

For math today we talked about numerals and started a game called Monster Math.  We separated cards of numerals and cards of pictures.  We took the numeral cards and put them in order from 1-20, or as high as we could go.  We ran out of time to learn the next step, but at home you can practice putting your cards in order and then matching the picture card to the numeral card.  We'll play more with that on Thursday.  We got SO much learning in today but not everything I had hoped to.  In the end we were a little scattered, but with a few tweaks and adjustments we'll be ready to learn even more in the coming days.