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!!