We created this bus on the first day of school. It quickly allowed me to assess scissor skills, ordering the letters in our names, and gluing skills. I got this idea from Kim Adsit's awesome Teachers Pay Teacher's store.
Gingerbread Man Glyph
We start each school year by hunting for the gingerbread man around our school. This helps students learn about many of the important people in our school.
Check out this awesome back to school gingerbread man book!
Mr. Munch
Mr. Munch is a friend that we feed objects to that start with a certain letter.
I use items from around the room and place them in this box I purchased from Lakeshore Learning.
Body Letters
We made letters with our bodies. What an awesome P!
Writing
Journal Writing
I use journals for the first few weeks of school before officially diving into Writer's Workshop. I just find the writing folder a little too overwhelming for my Kinder cuties at the beginning of the year. I transition into writing folders after a few weeks of using journals. Before we begin the journals, we make this chart to show three ways we can write a story. Then we hang it up to refer to all year.
Writer's Workshop
As the year progresses, we move into Writer's Workshop. Here is an anchor chart we created after a labeling lesson.
First we labeled real teddy bears, then we labeled me! We created this chart to help us remember the importance of labeling in our writing.
We also created this anchor chart to help us remember what good writers do. I had good intentions of taking pictures of us writing to add to the right side of this anchor chart, but that has yet to happen.
b and d
I created this visual for my students after much confusion about writing the letter b and the letter d.
Three Ways to Read
We created this anchor chart on the first and second day of school as a part of our Daily 5. I added Jabber the Reteller as a visual for the retelling part.
Sight Words
We have enjoyed learning sight words and reading leveled readers that have sight words. My students' confidence as readers is growing thanks to their mastery of sight word recognition. Here are some of our games we play to help with sight word recognition.
Roll a Sight Word
I created sight word dice with the words we had learned so far from this site and this organizer. Students roll the die and write the word they rolled in the box above the sight word. This game helps with recognition and printing.
King's Crown
I choose a student to be the king and they sit in my chair and I place the crown on his or her head. Then I tape a sight word to the crown so that the king cannot see it. The other students raise their hand and give clues about the word - such as the number of letters in the word, what sound it begins with, or a letter in the word.
Reading Strategies
Visualizing
We read the poem Green Giant and create our visualizations from the poem.
Picture Walks
Star Reader Strategies
How the Grinch Stole Christmas
We read this classic Christmas book then created an anchor chart about the Grinch's feelings.
Then we brainstormed how we could make him grin and completed a writing piece about Mr. Grinch.
I got this writing activity idea from Deanna Jump's Grinch Mini Unit on Teacher's Pay Teachers.
