Pre-K Again

As this school year draws to a close, our principal has sent out our "most likely" assignments for next year.  She calls them "most likely" because, as we all know, things can change over the summer.  If the needs of our students change, then staff assignments sometimes have to change too.

My "most likely" assignment for next year is back with the pre-k special needs population.  I'm ready for a change again, but I LOVE my school, so I didn't want to change that!  One of our pre-k teachers retired this May, so an opening came up at our school.  I love the language development and developmental play aspects of pre-k, so I"m excited.

I've started culling through some of my old pre-k files and rediscovered a blog from a pre-k teacher, Christi Seward in Cobb County.

She hasn't posted in a few years, so perhaps her teaching assignment changed or something else in her life changed, but she has a WONDERFUL collection of picture books with essential vocabulary and comprehension questions that she discusses.  She also has created many power points to support her lessons.

One of the books she highlights is "Bear Wants More" by Karma Wilson.

In addition to Christi's resources, there is also a YouTube read aloud with the book, too.  (This version is really sweet.  A boy received this as a birthday present and his family recorded him reading it out loud for the person who gave him the book.)

 

This has been a busy year and I haven't completed too many posts, but hopefully that will change this next year coming up!

Interrupting Chicken: A Social Skills Lesson

Last week one of our social skills lessons started with a read aloud of "Interrupting Chicken" by David Ezra Stein.

This is a great book to help children learn about controlling those impulsive moments of wanting to interrupt or blurt out during our whole group time.

We completed our read aloud, had a class discussion and then also completed some activities similar to those found at Happy Teacher, Happy Kids.

I can also be a little bit goofy and I want our social skills lessons to be fun, so the kids can really practice the skills and enjoy the results of prosocial behaviors.  Not just dread one more lesson with a bunch of rules that are hard for them to follow.  So as a result of my Pinterest addiction, I found a link to "Chicken Names" from Tilly's Nest and thought it would be fun to pair with this book.

The rules of the activity were pretty simple.  We were going to practice NOT being interrupting chickens.  If we could work on that, we could make a list of everyone's chicken name.  (I'm Yolko Scrambledore, by the way.)  It was fun.  One of the little girls in my class has the same birthday month as my assistant so she dubbed my assistant as her "Chicken Cousin."

There is also a YouTube video that has a read aloud.  I like to use the videos in addition to my read aloud because it gives my students one more way to access the text.

With a simple Google search, you can find many, many online resources and ideas that support this book.  These were just a few of the ones we used.

Rainforest Riddles...So Fun!

My class has been working on a unit that revolved around a Rainforest theme.  I chose this particular theme at this time because:

a) Students are usually very interested in the Rainforest theme and can be easily encouraged to read and write.
b) We have an expository text on the Rainforest in our reading series and I am required to base lessons off of our core curriculum materials.  (So I would have to do this anyway.)
c) There are hundreds of free resources and extensions available online.
d) Our school was in the middle of FSA testing.  Although I don't have any students testing this year, the resource teacher next to me is testing every day which means my class needs to be close to silent for the entire morning block.  Brutal (for the kids and me.....so I held out the carrot....if we were super quiet in the morning then we could do some fun, noisy rainforest activities in the afternoon.)

One of my favorite things we did with the unit was to write our own Rainforest Riddles.  I found a free pdf from First Grade Hip Hip Hooray on Teachers Pay Teachers.  The set gives several rainforest riddles already written that the students have to solve.  It has a nice set of graphics for a simple read, then cut and paste activity.  Finally, it also includes graphic organizers to help students write their own riddles.

My class really loved writing their riddles "in secret" and creating their animal from pieces from our arts and crafts scraps/materials.  We then combined all of our animal creations to make a rainforest bulletin board.

Here's our bulletin board.  Sorry!  The picture is a bit fuzzy and I still need to add "forest floor" to our layers.

Below are some close up examples of the writing samples they did.  You can see the different levels within the writing samples, but this was an activity that all of my students could participate in.  I like these types of projects because it brings our class together as "a whole."

Book Talk Tuesday

Since the summer has been in full swing, I have done a lot of blog hopping and reading links on Twitter streams.

I just found Gladys's blog over at Teaching in High Heels.  She and I have several things in common: like Gladys, I could spend large amounts of time and money investing in children's literature.  And I also agree everything LOOKS better in high heels, but I have to admit, I always have a pair of sparkly flip flops under my desk for when my feet hurt!

At any rate, I'd like to piggyback on Chelsea's "Book Talk Tuesday." Lulu is new to me and I love finding new books.  I can't wait to take a look at her series.

A series that my class has throughly enjoyed this year is Skippyjon Jones.

Skippyjon Jones is a Siamese cat who imagines spectacular adventures for himself as a chihuahua.

There is a whole series of books telling of Skippy's adventures.  They always include a warning from Mama Junebug, Skippy entering his closet as the cue that his imaginative adventures are beginning and poems that get the kiddos in my class clapping their hands and begging for me to repeat it "one more time."

I love to hear kids interacting with books, laughing and enjoying the experience.  I hope its one more step on the path for life long readers.

Daily Five Chapter 3

With all the concepts about setting up your room and gathering materials in chapter 3, the thing I most focused on was teaching my studetns the concept of a "good fit" book.

My assistants and I implemented the lesson outlined in the book that shows kids the concept of a good fit compared to the concept of shoes fitting well.  I brought in my husband's golf shoes, my scuba diving fins, my niece's tennis shoes (who is 3), a pair of high heels, etc.  The kids really started to understand that there was a difference to purpose and interest.

We have all of our books in bins and labeled according to their levels.  The students had their individual levels assigned to them and posted in the reading log folders.  I was in for a BIG surprise, however.

Shame on me....because they could pick out books in the library according to their levels and because they could tell me their levels, I assumed they could find them from our classroom library too.  Wrong!  They didn't understand the concept of a range.  So when I pulled out books and was showing them how to return them to our classroom library, I got lots of nods.  When I handed each child a random book and asked them to return it to the classroom library, they couldn't do it.  They didn't know that the bucket labeled 2.0-2.4, included levels 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 and 2.4.

When I figured out they couldn't return books to the right spot, I decided to ask them to show me which buckets they would look in if they wanted to find a book at their level....again, they didn't know how to do it!

We had to have several days of practicing cleaning up the books and finding books in their ranges before they understood this.

That was a good wake up call for me.  I didn't really even think about understanding the concept of a range being a prerequisite skill for be able to access books quickly and easily at their levels.

Sight Word Writing

This sight word strategy is truly an example of how good ideas just keep getting passed along and how many children can benefit from one teacher's great idea.

I have two children who are in second grade and reading at an end of kindergarten level this year.  They need a lot of practice with phonemic awareness skills and sight word mastery.  At this point, they have been exposed to the district curriculum materials so many times; they really need something new.  I'm always keeping my eyes open for them.

A friend of mine who is a kindergarten teacher was telling me she uses this strategy in her classroom.  She got it from another teacher on her team, who in turn got it when she and a group of teachers were working on literacy centers.  Wow!  How many times has it been passed along?  How many kids are learning because of it?  I love that aspect of teachers sharing ideas!

It's very simple.  You take a piece of plastic window screen (can be purchased at Home Depot) and cut it approximately 10 x 13.  Then you use electrical tape to tape off the edges on both sides.  Finally, use a blank sheet of paper or a simple typed up sight word worksheet and some crayons so children can practice writing their sight words "bumpy style."

I have put this in some TEACCH task baskets for these two boys.  I'm also thinking of making some more and adding it to my Daily 5 Working with Words choices.