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.

K1 Prep 7-10-18

I love teaching young learners.  They had so much fun this morning drawing what their family looks like when they go swimming.  We're already getting better at holding our pencils correctly and our drawing skills are so much improved from even last week.

 Our reading lessons went really smoothly today.  There are about a ZILLION skills that one must master when they are learning to read.  You have to look at the words, focus on one letter at a time, make the sounds, use your finger to help your eyes track, listen to the sound you're making, and put it all together.  Some of the key lessons from today included:

1. When you see a letter by itself as a word we say its name (example: a, I)
2. The first letter in a sentence is capitalized and indicates the start of a sentence.
3. A sentence ends with a period - which means "stop", or "the end"
4. New sight words were added 
5. Practice with new word families (this went so much better this week)
6. CVC (consonant, vowel, consonant) word practice
7. Introduction of adjectives

Here is the beginning reading lesson from today, please practice it at home if your child has a matching page in their binder.

 This week in math we're talking about 2D and 3D shapes and location words.  Today we reviewed and learned the main shape names and then played "I spy" using shape words.

 We also pulled out the shape blocks and were able to talk about the number of faces on 3D shapes.  I do this by putting stickers with faces on each face of the block.  We can only add a new sticker if we go around a corner.

Reading 101

As we start to teach kids to "sound out" words it's important to blend each sound to the next.  I can't stress enough how important it is to teach letter sounds without an added vowel after them. For example, the letter C says /c/ like /k/-at.  It does not say /cu/ like /cu/-at.  It's hard to understand from writing, but get the difference?  Cat vs. Cu-at.  Make the consonant sounds clearly without an added vowel ending and it will be so much easier to blend and read words that have any of the five vowels after a consonant. The video we took on Thursday is not very well positioned, so the audio is awesome, and my torso an feet are boring to look at.  Here is a look at a lesson from a few years ago that teaches the same concept.

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.