Reading and Math Centers

We have had such a great week! I am so impressed with how hard the kiddos have been working, and how much they are learning! I've recently started posting learning goals that describe the math and reading objectives we are working on each week. Even the kids are shocked by how much we are learning each day! 

Anyway, here are some pictures of the kids working in centers. We do two hours of reading daily. We typically start with 30 minutes of whole group instruction where we read stories and work on comprehension/vocabulary/phonemic awareness/letters & sounds/sight words. The children are given an independent task or seat work, and then they are self directed as they work i literacy centers for the next 60 minutes. During that time, I pull small groups to work in guided reading of books at their reading level. At the end, we come back together to share and review what we've learned. 

FYI- a "phoneme" is just a single, spoken sound. Phonemic awareness refers to a child's ability to hear and manipulate sounds in spoken words. Because it all oral (no print), even children who don't yet recognize their letters can develop strong phonemic awareness. We start with more simple phonemic awareness skills- like recognizing the beginning sounds of words or sorting pictures into groups by their beginning sounds. The children learn to hear and isolate the individual sounds in a spoken word. Later, the kids will learn to blends sounds into words ("What word is /l/ /a/ /p/?" "Lap.") and segment words into sounds ("Tell me all the sounds you hear in sun." "/s/ /u/ /n/"). Research shows that having strong phonemic awareness is one of the best predictors for reading success. It's a very easy thing to practice in the car, waiting in the grocery line, etc- because you don't need any materials!  

The kids have been awesome- learning to self regulate, locate their correct centers, problem solve and work with their friends, and engage themselves in literacy based activities. I can't begin to pull kids for small groups until the majority of them can keep themselves busy. For an hour. That's hard! I'm so proud :) Here are some pictures:

Lucida practices reading a poem at "read the room" center.

Ava practices fine motor skills, letter recognition, and letter formation in her independent work.

Maili and Alissa practice sight words and develop their fine motor skills at the sight word sticker center.

Feifei practices letter recognition and correctly sequencing the letters.

Turner practices forming letters and writing friends' names at the dry erase center.

Eli makes his own book to practice reading at home.

Tyler resells stories and reads books on our classroom library.

Abby and Owen hunt for sight words in magazines.

Jacob matches upper and lowercase letters and develops finger strength at the clothespins center.

Davin working on sight words at the sticker center.

In honor of fall, our class has been incorporating an apple theme into our afternoon math this week. Today, we used nonstandard measurement (instead of measuring tape or ruler, we used Apple cutouts) to measure the height of our classmates. We learned about what it means to collect data. The kids measured and recorded the "Apple height" of all the children in their group as their data. Tomorrow we will compile  the data to make a graph. Here are pictures of the children measuring each other: 

I hope you enjoyed catching up with what we've been up to! :)

I wish you well,

Miss Cramer

Dental Health Visit

This week we had more special visitors in the form of nursing students from UCO. They taught a fifteen minute lesson on dental health, discussing health foods and the correct way to brush your teeth. Here are a few pictures I snapped... 

Kaedyn and Jacob loved brushing the giant teeth.

The students did a great job of presenting the information in a way that kinderkids understood. Especially considering they are not teachers, the UCO students really rocked it!

Pact Pals

Our class is participating in the Pact Pal program with Edmond North, the high school that our elementary school eventually feeds into. On Friday home games, our Pact Pals (a football player and a cheerleader) will come visit the class for the last few minutes of the day. We has our first visit last week, and the kids had an awesome time! They loved Dalton and Jasmine!

Here a picture of the kiddos with our Pact Pals:

A few more candid shots from the visit... 

Having fun tossing around the football... 

And learning cheers from Jasmine!

The kids have been asking all week when our Pact Pals are coming back! 

The first week, in pictures and words

We've made it through the first two weeks! Woo hoo!

Our class has had so much fun getting to know each other- we have such a sweet group! The class has been learning how to navigate the school and all the different routines and procedures. As kindergartners, the kids go to music, the library, computer lab, P.E., and the cafeteria! There's a lot of ground to cover each day!

We were getting to know each other and learn about the school during the first week of school. We spent time practicing our good communication skills to make friends and play cooperatively. The kids also got an opportunity to explore all the fun stuff in our classroom :)

Here are some first week pictures: 

Abby watching Tyler use Starfall.com

Feifei and Erin use the math manipulatives or "busy boxes"

Alissa and Scarlett work on improving fine motor skills at the stencil center. 

Turner, Maili, and Addison working with Play-Doh

Gunnar and Maili working together in creative play.

David, Brayden, and Kaedyn 

Lucida, Turner, and Nathan

Eli, David, Owen, and Brayden

We read "Pete the Cat Rockin' In My School Shoes" (super fun book!) and made our own Pete the Cat.

We also learned our first poem of the year. All year long we will learn different poems and add them to our Poetry Journal, which the kids get to take home at the end of the year. The kids memorize the poem and practice reading it over and over. They learn to recognize words from the poem and have a chance to practice important concepts of print, such as moving left to right while reading, and one-to-one correspondence (saying one word for each written word). Here's Tyler reading the poem from our pocket chart: 

Eli, Kaedyn, Abby, and David add the poem to their poetry journal and illustrate it.

Eli, Turner, and Tyler check out the books in our classroom library. 

All the fun and learning can be exhausting... 

Stay tuned for pictures from week two...