Miss Cramer's Kindergarten Class: 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: