8 is GREAT!

Today we made it to 8 minutes of Read to Self stamina! We were so very excited that we told our principal and she came down to congratulate us. We had been in school for four days and made it to 8 minutes! It was quite the accomplishment for a room full of beginning readers. We are hoping to make it past ten minutes in our second week of school!

Play!

Friday afternoon we explored with math tools in our classroom that are considered a form of play for kindergarten. The students engaged in socializing, as well as critical thinking and problem solving with puzzles, blocks, lego table and housekeeping. Below are pictures of them enjoying these activities!

Our first poem!

Today marked the performance of our first poem. The class was very excited to read the poem all together, without my help! They did a wonderful job. I am hoping to have next week's poem on video.

Read 2 Self Day 3!

Today, I placed the students around the classroom in places that are perfect for Daily 5 Read to Self. Once each student was in a spot, we began timing our stamina. Our first round lasted one minute and thirty seconds. The second round went for an entire three minutes! I was so excited! Our final round was around one minute and thirty seconds. We debriefed after each round and discussed what good choices were made and a few things we need to work on to increase our stamina for tomorrow. We charted our stamina and we are focused on reaching our goal of ten minutes during this next couple of weeks. I personally hope they can make it a little longer than ten minutes, but we will have to see. 

Read 2 Self

Today we practiced building our stamina for the Daily 5 option Read to Self. We used two of our three ways to read a book, reading the pictures and reading the words. We were able to read for one minute the first round, two minutes, one minute and then we finished with two minutes. We talked about how building stamina is like running. If I asked them to run 100 times around the school would they be able to do it? Probably not. If I asked them to run from the front of the school to the side, would they be able to do it? Most likely! Each day we build up a little bit more stamina until we are able to reach our final goal. We have a goal right now of ten minutes. I am hoping that once we reach ten minutes we might be able to get anywhere between ten and fifteen minutes of stamina for each Daily 5 rotation. Tomorrow, I will place students around the room to practice stamina for Read to Self.

Exploring!

Grandparent talking to their grandchild who will be a new kindergarten student..."You're going to kindergarten! You are going to paint and play all day, you will love it!"

Unfortunately, with the pressures of testing and common core standards the amount of "play" in kindergarten has decreased a significant amount and is rarely seen on a daily basis other than recess. Today, I had students numerous times asking when we would get to play. Luckily, I had in my lesson plans to explore (my fancy term for play) with our math manipulatives in the afternoon! Below are pictures where the class was able to explore while using the manipulatives and their imaginations in buidling and creating various things.

Sight Word "I"

Every week we will learn a new sight word! Today our new sight word/popcorn word was the word "I". We practiced reading the word in our weekly poem and also thought of sentences using the word "I".

3 Ways To Read a Book

Today we started off on our Daily 5 and CAFE adventure! Our very first lesson was 3 ways to read a book. We talked about how, as kindergarteners, they are already readers and they didn't even realize it! They can already read any book by just reading the pictures and making up their very own story. We practiced this today with the book "Miss Bindergarten Gets Ready for Kindergarten". The class was very excited to learn they are already learning to read on the very first day of school. We will work on retelling a story later in the week and reading the words will come as we learn more and more sight words and phonics skills.

Welcome to Kindergarten!

Hello! Welcome to the 2011-2012 school year. I am very excited to get this year started and underway. Room 26 is set up and ready for the 19 kindergarten students to come through the door on Tuesday morning. We will be learning many things year and having a lot of fun along the way. I look forward to the 90 minute reading block and fully implementing Daily 5/CAFE for both literacy and math. Take a look at the video below to get a preview of the fun that is to come this year in kindergarten!

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