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NEW RESOURCE - Word Families - Long Vowel '' O ''
A Week in Our Kindergarten Garden
by Lisa...
Our garden is planted in a small suburb outside of the Chicago, IL.
There are twenty-one students ranging from five and six in the kindergarten class, all with diverse needs, talents, interests, and experiences.
Each morning begins with a meeting, where students gather in a circle on our rug, we called, "Paradise Island". It is essential to cultivate an environment where all studentsfeel special and all thoughts are respected. Students then greet each other with a high five or another cheer.
Next, students are allowed to share one thingwith the class. Finally, we read the morning message aloud that I write to them every morning in a friendly letter format which informs them on what we will be doing that day in class. Lately, most of our talks revolve around our two monarch butterflies that just hatched. The class voted on the names, Spotty and Autumn!
We then go right into Language Arts.
We always start with our phonemic awareness exercises which are done aloud and include motions. We blend, segment, chop syllables, rhyme, repeat, and much more! We then have our reading lesson. After the lesson, students practice this at a center, which has been designed to accomodate their learning needs. I havecenters geared towards students above grade level, at grade level, and below grade level because materials must be altered to suit each child's ability level.
We then have a read aloud, which is usually performed by a parent that has volunteered to visit our garden. We call this the "Reader of the Day", and students are delighted to have their parent be involved in the school day and most importantly it continually motivates them to grow in their reading skills.
Our read aloud is always followed by a writing lesson. The writing lesson involves a graphic organizer before we begin our writing. We then visit our "word garden" to water our sight word seeds, and review new and previous words we planted in our garden!
I am a firm believer that students can remember anything put to a song and a beat. We have dozens of songs, along with flip charts that we sing daily.
The afternoon is dedicated to Math, Science, and interventions. Math lessons always begin with direct instruction, followed by an activity where students are working as partners or in small groups to experience first hand what they learned and practice the specific skill. Our lesson this week focuses on graphing. In today's lesson, students graphed the first and last letter of their name on the haunted house bulletin board in the classroom.
We then switch gears to Science. We just completed our "Metamorphisis Unit". We raised baby caterpillars and watched them morph into beautiful Monarchs. The stages of development of the butterfly were connected to the changes, that the students experienced, from a baby to a big boy and girl attending a full day of school. We used the theme of "metamorphisis" interchangeably between our butterflies and ourselves. We voted on their names, and then sadly had to let them go. We went to a local park and set them free and hoped that they would come back and visit our garden!!!!
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I saw an interesting post on Pinterest the other day, showing a plastic, sandwich size, zip-lock bag that had had a piece of duct tape run along the base. The duct tape provided reinforcing that allowed holes to be punched through the bag for storage in a binder. I imagine you could run the tape down the side of larger zip-lock bags for a similar effect. This may not solve all your storage issues, but if there\'s just a few small games to go with a unit that\'s otherwise stored in a binder, it might help!
By Melinda
Continue Reading...I was just thinking the other day that I needed some matching cards for numbers over 100 then today I came across the new parts of speech posters and thought I\'d check out the \"What\'s New\" section and there I found exactly what I had been wanting. Thank you so much for your wonderful resources. This is the first place I check when looking for resources and I\'ve been able to build a great collection since moving to the lower school grades last year. Thanks again!
By Kylie
Continue Reading...I love the fun and colourful design of these posters! They are fantastic!
By Kylie
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