After much practice, we have started READING!

Wow!  I didn't realize just how long it's been since I have had the chance to post.  I've been going through a lot in my personal life on top of the beginning of the school year craziness and just have not had time to add anything on here from our classroom.  So I would like to jump back in by bragging on my munchkins in their reading portion of literacy block!

We are trying to embrace the Daily Five reading program by Gail Boushey and Joan Moser.  You can order the book from Amazon here.  And I highly recommend you do!!!  :)

The first of the Daily Five is Read to Self.  We talk as a class how this should look and what it should sound like.  My students have gotten up to 15-20 minutes of nearly (I do teach Kindergarten...) uninterrupted independent reading.  They take their book boxes and a carpet square to their own spot around the room (as far away from everyone else as needed), and get to reading right away.  This is such a beautiful thing, I almost start to cry every day because it amazes me how well involved these young children are in books.  But enough gab and sap...  Let me show you what it looks like in our classroom!!!  :)

 The second daily five we are working on is Work on Words - though I have not taught them that term yet, as I have been unable to be in school for the past two weeks due to my personal stuff.  But we have been learning how to work with letters so that we can transition into Work on Words.

 Students pull a stick out of a cup that has a foam letter stuck on it.  They then use these cute pumpkin beads to make the letter on a foam mat.

 This helps them with letter recognition, formation, as well as fine motor!  :)

 At this station, they had a tub of rice with different kinds of letters mixed in.  They had to pull a letter out using tweezers and write it on the board.  Now we're working on letter recognition and writing, as well as fine motor, still!

 How cute are these letter dominoes?!  Found them at the Dollar Spot at Target!!!  I bought two so I used a marker on the back of each and put a squiggle of one color or the other so they can hopefully keep them in the right group!

 I saw this on Pinterest here and loved the letter racing!  However, I wanted to add some beginning sound pictures, so I spent a little time putting them together.  Please feel free to email me at dbloh7chickk@aol.com and I'd LOVE to share this with you!!!  Also, I found the cubes at the Dollar Tree in a pack of 50, called "Foam Counting Cubes."  I was so excited because not only are they easy to write on - they're SILENT!!!  :)

Ocean Sensory

 My friend and I have been doing a lot of looking at different sensory bin ideas online.  Most often, they are used with toddlers and preschool, but we were talking about it and we thought they would be perfect for our Kindergarteners!!!!  We upped the level, of course, but our main goal is to get them thinking about "why would that be put in there?" and trying to make connections from the information they already know to what we are learning in class.  This is our "ocean tub," where you can find an assortment of items from the ocean.

Somehow, I did not have very many toy fish, so most of mine consists of other things from the ocean:  words on popsicle sticks that relate to the ocean, aquarium rocks and jewels, eyeballs, paper fish, a guide I found in my closet that lists different fish found in the ocean, plastic boats, and shells!  One important thing that I didn't capture on my camera - we've been learning about measurement in our classroom, so I have set out some balance scales for the kids to weigh and measure, comparing different things and so much more!  I plan to set out some rulers that they can measure the lengths of the items this week.  We also have our students writing about the tub.  Last week, it was making lists of things in the ocean, this week it will be writing a story about swimming in the ocean and all of the things that can be seen.  I will try to get some pictures up of the kids playing in the tub, I took these before they arrived.  :)

At the end of each unit, I pack everything up into a big Ziploc bag to store until next year - taking up much less space in the closet and much cheaper than buying bins for each unit!!  :)  Happy sensing!!!!