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.
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.
