Fall Snapshot

The Kindergarten class burst into the building, in their usual, squiggly, squirmy line.  Cheeks rosy, jackets bought with room-to-grow hanging on their wiggly little frames, some with hoods or collars accidentally tucked in at the neck. (No one had their coat on upside-down, or inside-out this time, thankfully…)  After a fall nature hike on the Outdoor Learning Center trails, they were clutching clumps of yellow, brown and red leaves in their little fists, thrusting them out towards me, like proud suitors with bouquets of roses. 

“Look! Look, Mrs. S! Look at my leaves! Aren’t my leaves pretty? Look at these, they’re yellow! Mine are red, Mrs. S.! We went for a walk, and got these!”

The excitement was palpable, as I smiled and exclaimed over the beautiful fall bounty.

I chuckled to myself, as the substitute teacher herded the happy children into the classroom to put their leaves in their backpacks.  Parents will be finding dry, brown leaves crammed in the bottom of book bags a week from now, when they have become crumbly, forgotten treasures.

In these days of rigorous instruction, Common Core Standards, and near-constant assessments, it’s nice to take a break for a nature walk now and then, and relish being five years old in the fall.

Fun With Beginning Sounds

I just completed 9 rounds of centers with the Kindergarten cuties that I work with.  I usually do two centers in my room, and the K teacher I work with does the rest in her room next door.  After nine days of doing the same activities, I have to say I'm ready for something new! We start fresh Monday.

Here are the beginning sounds centers that we've been doing:

ABC Mystery Box and Letter Stamping
Oh, but this one was a hit! I scrounged a Gladware container from the depths of my cluttered kitchen cabinet, and by some stroke of luck, actually found a lid that fit.  Then, I went on a scavenger hunt around my house to find little objects to add to my new Mystery Box.  I found a Lego (heh, with a 9 year old boy in the house, you can't take one step without finding a Lego, or two! Ouch!), a shell, a key, a puzzle piece, a domino, and several other random little objects.  Then, I went back to my kitchen, and filled the rest of the box most of the way with rice.  (I ran out of white, and had to add some brown, too.  That just adds to the fun, right?)  Then, I squirted Elmer's glue onto the lid in the crevice where it fits onto the container.  I wasn't sure how this would hold up, but I have to say I'm quite pleased.  After being used by 28 little people, the lid hasn't come open once!  I decorated the box with some crafty sticky letters I had, and voila! ABC Mystery Box!

Anyhow, I had the kiddos take turns shaking the box to find objects.  When something was found, we identified the beginning sound of the object, and then we found the matching letter stamp and stamped the letters on big pieces of paper.  I heard lots of comments of "This is fun!" and "I love this center!",a nd we learned some new sounds, as well.  ( I had put a checker in the box, so we learned about /ch/ and /sh/ for shell.)

My other center was...uh....interesting.  I needed a more independent activity for this station, so I dug out some beginning sounds matching cards from our closets.  I share a room with the Resource teacher, and she has all kinds of interesting stuff in there.  The cards were pretty simple, kiddos drew lines between pictures with the same beginning sound, or identified what letter the pictures began with.  I really should have looked closer at these cards before I decided to use them-some of the pictures were...ummmmm.....old fashioned.  I later discovered that this set was made in 1976, which explains a lot.  There were many pictures that kids of the 70's or 80's would have known right away, but kids of today just aren't familiar with.  (Nurse with huge afro in white nurse hat, radishes, goofy looking sailor in white hat, seeds in the form of pine needles and one of those 'helicopter' dealies, among others.)  There were also a few things that were identifiable, but not really considered appropriate for school these days.  (Rifle, an ax from a rock and stick that looked just like a tomahawk, etc.) Anyhow, we just rolled with it, and it worked out, but I did get a few giggles from it!

I've got some more CVC centers to tell you about that my Kindy/First group have been working on, but this post is getting long enough, so those will have to wait!

I usually have to rush around to have time to get any pictures taken, plus, I'm not comfortable with posting their faces online, so I'm always trying to hurry and snap a quick picture before they turn around and start hamming it up.  In other words, sorry my pictures are so bad!!

Remember Me?

     Well, after abandoning this blog for a long while, I'm back!  I'm working as an RTI Interventionist/Classroom Assistant, and keeping busy.

      I've been working with a sweet bunch of 12 first graders and 2 kindies who are grouped together due to their need of improvement with nonsense word fluency, per DIBELS.  I also help a kindergarten teacher by planning and running two of her daily  language arts centers for her.  Soon, our resource teacher, special education assistant, and I will be joining forces to work with our SPED and RTI 3rd and 4th graders for half an hour a day-we are going to look at some test data, and create center group rotations.  I'll also be leading a group of rambuctious second grade boys for half an hour a day.  When I'm not with my groups, I'm doing lunch duty with "my" kindergarten and first grade cuties, helping in classrooms, recording data for RTI documentation, creating RTI plans, attending meetings, or wishing there were two of me! With all of this going on, I thought I'd come back to the blog from time to time, and share some of the things I'm working on with my groups of kiddos at school, in case someone is looking for ideas for working with small (and not so small!) groups. I will also pop in from time to time with some funny anecdotes, education news, and what-not.

     For my current Kindergarten centers, the classroom teacher asked me to plan some activities with beginning sounds for this rotation.  One group is playing a beginning sounds board game with me, while the other group is doing a sound match up game.

• Sound Match-up Pocket Chart Activity-I prepared a pocket chart with 6 letters cards, each with a picture beside it with the corresponding sound.  Children take turns pulling a picture card from a little bag, and putting it on the chart next to the letter that it begins with. 

 

 My Kindergarten/First grade SST (Student Success Time) group is working on CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words.  After spending a few minutes as a whole group, practicing letter sounds and sight words, and blending some words together, we are breaking up into centers.  I only have 3 centers for this week, but next week, I'll have 5 going. (Phew! This half hour goes FAST!)
Here they are:

• SMART Table CVC activities-we are lucky enough to have a new SMART table in our room this year, and I am excited about using this great resource-the kids are, too!
• Alphabet Arc-this is my "guided" center-the kiddos match letter tiles to the letters printed on their mats, and then we spell cvc words by pulling the needed letters down from the arc.  We might start with something like "at", then I'll have them change it to "mat", and then to "man", then to "fan", and on to "fin".  Some friends have trouble when it comes to changing middle and ending sounds, so we'll count the sounds we hear on our fingers, and then say one sound for each finger to see which one is different.

• FCRR CVC cards-this is an activity from the FCRR (Florida Center for Reading Research) website.  We use this amazing resource often at our school.  In this particular activity, students use laminated CVC word cards with corresponding pictures.  They have to write in the missing letter on the word card with a dry erase marker, and then write the word on a record sheet.

That's it for this week.  I've got some fun ideas rolling around in my head for next week's groups, that I'll share soon!  Thanks for sticking around!