PBL Project ~ Who Am I? Last week, the students pulled all of the pieces they have been creating about themselves together to make an All About Me poster. Each student's poster includes a self-portrait, a family portrait, a drawing of their favorite activity, a watercolor painting of their home and a plate of their favorite food. On Thursday, the students practiced presenting these posters to their tablemates during a station. During the presentation, I asked each student to: ~ introduce yourself ~ introduce your family members ~ tell us something about your home ~ tell us about your favorite activity ~ tell us what your favorite foods are Before this practice we reminded ourselves that good speakers have a still body, a clear voice and an engaged mind. After each student presented, the audience provided feedback about what they observed the speaker’s body, voice and brain doing during the presentation. The speakers also gave the audience feedback about their listening. This week, students will practice their presentation one more time while their learning partner videos them. Speakers will then watch the video of their speaking and assess what they observe their body, voice and brain doing in the video. They will fill out a speaking rubric and then set a goal for how they plan to improve their speaking for their final presentation. We will start final presentations on Thursday! I will draw fair sticks to determine the order of speakers. Stay tuned ~ photos of posters and presentation videos will be posted on student's e-folio pages soon. | Wrapping up Letter of the Day! Ms. Katz presented the last letter of the day last week. The students have loved this routine, especially the Zoo phonics animals Mindy and I teach to help students connect to the letter sounds. Each day we put up a photo of the featured animal up on our front wall after teaching the letter. When we taught A, we taught Allie Alligator and put up a photo of an alligator. We also put up a photo of some acorns, telling the students that A is a special letter called a vowel, and vowels say two sounds – planning to come back to teach the long vowels in more depth once we have taught all other letters. When we taught E, we put up a photo of Ellie Elephant, the Zoophonic featured animal. We also put up a photo of an eel, again saying that E is a vowel like A and makes two sounds – planning to come back to this later. When we got to I, same same. We put up a photo of icicles along with Inchy Inchworm. When I got to O, we added Olive Octopus to our Zoophonics song, teaching the short O sound. When I added a photo of an Orca next to Olive, once again telling the kids that O is a vowel and also says it’s name, Owen HP asked, “What is the whale’s name?”. His question came just as we were transitioning into our Bibbity Bobbity Boo freeze game, so we promised to come back to it soon. The next morning, Owen came into the classroom before class, asking again what we are going to name the whale. Owen’s question led to a great class discussion, which resulted in our class deciding to add the long vowel animals to the Zoophonics song. Since then, I have replaced the acorns with aphids and the icicles with an ibex. We are now working on lyrics for a verse to add to our song that includes Ava the Aphid, Evie the Eel, Irene the Ibex, Owen the Orca and Uni the Unicorn (we cheated and added one make believe animal, just because unicorns are SO cool!). Stay tuned for a video of the full song when it is complete! |
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Exploding as Writers!Our first writers' workshop unit is going amazingly well! The students have been so excited to write and have all taken the risk to stretch out words and write the letters that they hear down on their papers! We have been doing a lot of class writing during our mini-lessons ~ we think of ideas to write about together and then stretch out the words we want to write together, saying the letter sounds we hear. I write the letters they hear down as they say them, modeling how to use two finger spaces, capital letters and other conventions. We then stretch the words back out, saying the sounds the letters we wrote down say to read the words we wrote together. The goal with Kindergarten writers is to help them get their stories and ideas out of their heads and on paper the best they can using words and pictures! If a child is hesitant to write the words, they may still need to work on their letter sounds, which is something you can help with at home. If they are ready to write and want help at home, help them by stretching out the words they want to write, exaggerating the sound each letter makes. They may not hear all of the sounds, and most likely will not spell the words they write like they are spelled in a book. Don’t worry! That will come later. For now, we want kids to be able to record enough sounds that they are able to look back at the letters they wrote and read the words.  Last week, we practiced solving problems on our own so we could carry on as independent writers. We also got our first writing partner and practiced turning our pieces into books and scrolls. In just one week, many writers went from writing one page pieces to writing scrolls and books with many, many pages of writing! This week, we will be talking about how to plan how our books will go, page by page. We will also be learning how to ask and answer questions with our writing partners to add even more writing to our scrolls and books.   | Reading Independently Each readers' workshop, we practice our independent (back to back) reading, charting our stamina on our stamina chart. Our goal is to stay engaged in our reading for 10 minutes. So far, we have read for about 5 minutes. what Back to Back reading |
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