'Twas the Night Before Halloween

Ok, so, it's not exactly the night before Halloween, but it's getting close! Since my school spends all day Friday celebrating the holiday, I decided to spend Thursday doing fun Halloween activities in class with the little ones. This week has been out of control with Red Ribbon Week events, activities, dress up days and more, so I'm ready for a fun-filled day in Kindergarten.

Most, if not all, of what we will be doing I got for free, so I'll include links to everything in case you are interested in using it yourself! Here is our plan for tomorrow:

Math

Count to 100 Every Day

(we literally do this every day and they still love it)

After this quick warm up we will be doing some Halloween hundreds chart pictures:

Next, we will review patterns (which we have been working on for a while now) and complete this Halloween pattern worksheet: 

Reading & Writing

Next, we will be reading Aaaargghh, Spider! (if you don't have this book there are plenty of read-aloud videos on youtube of the book) and completing a graphing and writing activity from this mini unit created by Miss Kindergarten.

Art Project

Just for Fun

Happy Halloween!

PALS

I recently earned a Master's degree in Reading Instruction which has been so, incredibly useful for me as a Kindergarten teacher! In one of my classes, we were introduced to a strategy called PALS that I want to share with you today.

PALS = Peer Assisted Learning Strategies - a.k.a. students helping each other to learn.

I never thought that I would allow Kindergartners to play teacher and help each other learn before I learned about and tried out PALS, but now it is one of my favorite ways to work on reading skills. 

Before giving my students an activity to work on together, I model how PALS is going to work. I ask a volunteer to be my partner and I have him or her read aloud to me (they could be reading letters of the alphabet, simple sentences containing sight words, or more advanced text depending on grade level and reading ability of the students). While he or she is reading I say "great job!" at the end of each sentence. If he or she makes a mistake I say "Stop! Try Again". Then, I ask the student volunteer to listen while I read and give me feedback. He or she tells me that I am doing a great job and corrects my mistakes by telling me to stop and try again (which they all find hilarious for some reason). After modeling the voice level (WHISPER) that I would like them to use, I assign pals and pass out the reading passage for the day. 

Today we did a fun Halloween reading passage that began with very simple sentences such as, "P is for Pirate". Once they showed me that they could handle that, I let them do the next page with passages that were a bit longer and said things like, "P is for Pumpkin. I see 5 pumpkins". They spent about ten minutes taking turns reading these to their pals and all really enjoyed not only getting to read, but also having the chance to correct and give feedback to their partners. 

I got today's reading passages from this awesome Freebie made by Common Core Connection.

Pumpkins

Tomorrow we are going on our first field trip of the year to a pumpkin patch with First Grade! 

For the past few weeks we have been studying plant life cycles and what living things need to grow. Today, we took what we learned from that unit and applied it to our new unit on pumpkins.

We started out by reading this short and sweet informational text, Pumpkins, that came in my Scholastic Welcome Fall book packet (which I highly recommend purchasing by the way).

Then we put these Pumpkin Life Cycle picture cards in order and discussed how a pumpkin grows just like other plants that we have studied. 

Finally, the students completed their own pumpkin life cycle worksheet by coloring, cutting, and gluing the pictures in the correct order. 

Here's the finished product :)

The life cycle picture cards and worksheets came from the fantastic, free Pumpkins Unit by Nicole Ricca that you can pick up here.

Beginning Sounds

As I have mentioned before and will probably mention again many times, I am loving interactive notebooks this year. I am working on a science interactive notebook post and freebie for you, but in the meantime I wanted to share an English/Language Arts interactive notebook page that my kids did today. We have been drilling beginning sounds using songs, music and movement, games, worksheets, homework, decodable readers, etc...etc...etc...

I was getting a little bit bored with that (as were my little learners), so I decided to change things up and purchased this awesome interactive alphabet journal from Miss Kindergarten.

I really love this product, and my students love cutting, coloring, and gluing anything so it makes the tedious and repetitive process of learning the letter sounds a little bit more engaging. Before working on each letter sound individually, I had them complete this page about beginning sounds.

I, of course, had to do the whole thing first under my document camera to make sure that they all understood what to do. 

Then, I passed out the page and told them to cut only the dotted lines, not the fat lines and they did a great job with that!

(he felt the need to use all of his body weight to make the glue really stick) :)

Next, I asked them to fold their little pieces along the fat lines and show me where they were supposed to glue before I gave them their sheet to glue onto and allowed them to get started. The kids seemed to really enjoy this activity and most of them did a fantastic job!

Of course, there were some that ended up looking like this:

but, hey, they did their best and that's what counts...right?

You can pick up your own copy of this page at my TPT store by clicking on the picture below. 

Parent Teacher Conferences Part 2

Today we finally begin parent teacher conferences! Woohoo! - As much as I dislike feeling like I am speed-dating and having to meet with 10 sets of parents in a row for fifteen minutes each, I really do think that this is a valuable time to get them on board with helping their child at home. There is only so much differentiation/intervention/one-on-one help we can provide within the classroom so it is extremely important that parents understand a) what their child can do to improve in school and b) how they can help. 

As I mentioned in my last post, I spend the week before conferences testing the little ones to see how many more letters and numbers they recognize, whether they can count syllables, whether they can isolate beginning sounds, identify parts of a book, count to 20, count objects up to 20 etc... All the foundational skills that they will need in order to be successful throughout the rest of the year. 

Now that I have all of that data ready to share with their parents, I am prepared to sit down with each of them and tell them how much their child has already improved since day 1 of Kindergarten and what I would like to see them work harder on. I have found that the best way to do this is to give the parents a little bit of extra homework. So, in case you would like to do the same thing, here is a list of the areas for improvement that I suggest and materials that I will provide for parents to help their child. 

1) Fine Motor Skills: Hand-eye coordination, efficient use of fingers, hands and wrists, etc... Without these skills children have a very hard time writing, cutting, gluing, turning the pages of books and more. Basically everything that they need to be able to do in Kindergarten and beyond relies on these skills being well developed. Here is a handout that you can grab to encourage parents to work on these at home! 

2) Letter Recognition: If students are still struggling with letter naming fluency, I send home a set of uppercase and lowercase letter flashcards and this handout listing different activities that they can do to practice at home. 

3) B&D Confusion: A lot of Kindergarten students have a hard time differentiating between lowercase b & d. There are a lot of great handouts in this packet from Classroom Freebies. I won't use all of them because all of the different strategies together might confuse the student. I'll pick one or two like the "bed" pictures and remind them that "the Bb's are walking and the Dd's are talking". 

4) Numbers: If students are struggling with counting objects, recognizing numerals, or number names, I give them a set of flashcards to work on.

5) Writing: I show parents samples of student writing and use this amazing writing portfolio and rubric with samples from Heidisongs.com.