Welcome! My name is Beth Coogle. I have taught pre-K - 3rd grade since 1991. I have been teaching Public School Kindergarten in Title 1 schools since 2000. Follow my Blog for kindergarten classroom ideas.
Our days in kindergarten continue to be full of fun as we learn one new letter each day. Our mornings begin with coloring a puppet and pictures that begin with the letter of the day. We then come together and sing with our puppets. Each cute little song is sung to the tune of Old Mac Donald had a Farm.
On Tt day the students arrived to find Teddy Bears from Dollar Tree waiting for them along with their puppets. I try each day to find memorable activities that connect the letters and sounds to their sweet little brains.
We made Itsy Bitsy Spider water spouts out of straws for letter Ii. I gave each child an oversized bendable straw and a spider ring. We moved the spiders as we sang the song.
We sorted rings, rattles and rocking horses on letter Rr day. These little Dollar Store tweezers and lunch trays worked perfectly for small motor strengthening and practice sorting.
We made many connections with our book this week, How Do Dinosaurs Go To School by Jane Yolen. One of the favorites was a STEM activity from my TPT Unit. We loaded up a large vehicle with large dinosaurs and a small vehicle with small dinosaurs. We counted how many dinosaurs each could carry from home to school. After doing the activity whole group, it was moved to a free choice station.
Our daily small groups meet for 20 - 30 minutes. The students are learning to work independently at stations doing a variety of activities.
At their seats they are practicing identifying beginning sounds as they make their character hats.
At the teacher table the children are learning many skills with the weekly and daily letters.
1. The students practice forming their letters
2. The students practice matching and identifying the letters of the week. They also practice matching beginning sounds for those letters and producing each letter sound in isolation.
3. The students build words with their letters.
4. The students read books with pictures that begin with the letter of the day and sight words they need to learn.
5. The students learn to build sentences and track print.
All of these skills are part of our daily small group:
Today we began our second set of letters: Dd, Ff, Tt, Rr, and Ii. Our main book this week will be How do Dinosaurs go to School. The children are still needing work on the roles of an author and illustrator. Last week we highlighted the work of Laura Numeroff and Felicia Bond. This week our highlighted author and illustrator are Jane Yolen and Mark Teague. We introduced the connection between the two author / illustrator studies with the book If You Give a Dog a Donut. And, of course we had powdered donuts.
All of our literacy stations this week have activities centering on our book. Here the children match rhyming pictures then record the matches they found.
Another station involves the children drawing pictures of how a dinosaur should and should not behave at school. While six students work at the five literacy stations, another six are working on making their letter of the day hat and coloring their book.
The remaining group of five students works at the table with me. We are learning to identify the letters, match the capital and lower case letters, write the letters, identify beginning sounds, blend the sounds into words, track print, and form sentences.
As I have stated in previous blogs, the students need many opportunities to build their small motor skills. We are rolling playdough to form our letters of the week and picking up little dinosaurs with tweezers. We are in the path of a Tropical Storm, so school released early today. I had planned on making shape dinosaurs during our math rotations. We will have to do these another day, since our time ran out.
I plan on adding a new video showing a small group lesson with our letters of the week later in the week. Check back to view the lesson and see more fun things happening in our class.
We finished our first week with the alphabet. Most of the children have learned that letters make sounds. They are able to match the capital and lowercase letters for Aa, Bb, Cc, Mm and Ss. Some are starting to blend these sounds to read words like cab, Sam, bam, and Cam. They are able to identify the front cover, back cover and title page of a book. Many now know the role of an author and illustrator. Our first math test showed most know the numbers 0 - 5. Forming the letters and numbers seems to be our biggest challenge. I need to add more fine motor strengthening activities to our stations. I am going to write the letters on clothespins and have them build their names with clothespin letters. I already added tweezers to the sand table, so I will continue that next week. I am going to pull out some lacing beads and lacing cards for afternoon stations.
To celebrate the end of our first set of 5 letters, we made posters to display in the hallway. The children really enjoyed working with glue and an assortment of materials. I was also able to see which children struggled to understand the concept of beginning sounds. Most did an amazing job matching Apple Jacks to Aa, Butterflies and Buttons to Bb, Cotton Balls to Cc, Macaroni to Mm, and Star Sequins to Ss. I glued the capitals onto the black construction paper. They glued the lower case letters and collage materials. Next week we will do the letter Dd, Ff, Tt, Rr, and Ii. Our main book will be the How Do Dinosaurs go to School by Jane Yolen and the other How Do Dinosaur books.
Today my class learned all about the letter Aa. They entered the room and began coloring Allie Alligator and the six "a" pictures. My students have desks, so when they finish coloring, they place all six cards into a zip lock bag. Both the puppet and bag go into their desks. I have several activities they may select including reading books or getting their STEM/Reading bin. I am slowly introducing technology. I was super excited because today I was able to pull a few students over for assessments while they colored. My kindergarteners are learning their morning routine!
The picture shows the daily materials for letter Aa.
7:55 - 8:45 - Students enter the classroom. They color their puppets and 6 pictures that begin with the letter of the day. (Today was Allie Alligator.)
8:45 - 9:10- We meet as a whole group. We begin at desks singing the daily letter song to the tune of Old MacDonald.
This instrumental version of the song goes perfectly with our verses. When the song is finished, we place everything in our desks and come to the carpet for two alphabet songs. We dance to Who Let the Letters Out by Dr. Jean and The Alphabet Song by Jack Hartman. We touch the sky and say the letter. Touch our shoulders and say the picture name. Touch the ground as we say the letter sound. Then we touch our shoulders again to say the picture name. There are three times we get to play our air guitars in The Alphabet Song. It is a work out. The movements are from Dr. Jean's Phonercise song. After our songs we quickly review meeting time rules. I do a daily read aloud. During our read aloud we do some Think-Pair-Share or Mirror Teaching from Whole Brain Teaching. Today we did Mirror teaching for the role of the author and illustrator. If you haven't looked at Whole Brain Teaching, I highly recommend it. Of course our book was Ten Apples Up on Top.
I play another phonics song and the children transition back to their seats. This song is Alphabet Lane from Sing Spell Read and Write. After the song we go over the stations and seatwork. During our 26 letter lessons seatwork is making their letter hat and coloring their My Aa Book.
9:15 We begin station rotations. Each group meets with me for about 20 - 30 minutes. We take an hour break for special areas and snack at 10:00. At my table the students:
1. Match Capital and Lower Case Letters.
2. Match a beginning sound picture to each letter.
3. Build words with the 5 letters of the week.
4. Read their My Aa Book.
5. Practice writing the letter of the day.
6. Build and write a sentence from their My Aa Book.
The other two stations are seatwork (Coloring hats and books) and literacy stations (Rhyming, Word Work, Letters, Letter Sounds, and Writing/Vocabulary)
11:40 - We do our math meeting which includes more songs and numerous math skills. I try to hit all of the math domains: Counting and Cardinality, Operations and Algebraic Thinking, Numbers and Operations in Base Ten, Measurement and Data, and Geometry daily.
12:00 - Lunch and Recess
12:55 - 2:00 Afternoon Rotations which include:
1. Meeting with the teacher for a math lesson
2. Working on Technology
3. Play Centers and STEM Activities
Some afternoons I change things up a bit. For example, today I had the students color an apple instead of doing a math lesson with me. Then I called three students over at a time to do their Chapter 1 math test.
This art project is part of my Memory Book Unit in TPT.
Tomorrow I am going to meet with the other three students in each group. The assignment tomorrow will be to glue objects onto the letters we learned this week. Back when we used to do a letter a day, we always glued Apple Jacks onto letter Aa, cotton balls or Cookie Crisp Cereal onto letter Cc, sequins or stars onto letter Ss, buttons or butterflies onto letter Bb, and macaroni onto letter Mm. I still love these great fine motor activities. Therefore, we will do a collage of all five letters at one time. Check back tomorrow to see how it turns out!
2:00 Clean Up/Pack Up
2:15 Closing Meeting
2:30 Walk to Buses
Each day the children are showing me new skills they are acquiring. Today one child wrote his name for the first time. Another child made it through lunch without vomiting, and another shared her red crayon. It is all the little things, and the not so little things that make kindergarten full of amazing adventures. Check back to see how our week ends.
We learned all about the letter Mm on the third day of our magnificent journey through the alphabet. Since my classroom is full of monkeys and trees, we had to sing "Five Little Monkeys Swinging in the Tree."
Tomorrow we will do letter Aa, so the song and props will work really well for that also.
We also read If You Give a Moose a Muffin. One report card skill in kindergarten is to know the role of the author and the illustrator. I love the Laura Numeroff books with Felicia Bond's illustrations. I have several of the books out in our classroom library. Their books are a great place to learn the roles of an author and illustrator. We will read many of them on our alphabet journey. We revisited Brown Bear Brown Bear What Do You See by Bill Martin Jr. and did an M&M activity similar to the Skittle one yesterday.
Along with our phonics songs and story we also sang our Molly Monkey puppet song during circle time.
The children used their puppets and pictures to change out the verses with me. When we meet daily for small group time, the sorting beginning sound pictures are the same ones from their hats and puppet songs.
Here is a short video showing the picture and letter sorting. These materials are available in my TPT store, but you can use whatever materials you have.
Station 1: Six students worked at the sand and fossil station hunting for spiders. This stations was introduced yesterday.
Station 2: Six students explored the Marble Works and magnets. They really love both activities. I have tubs above each child's cubby. When students finish their work, they can grab a tub. Each tub has a manipulative and some books. Some have coloring books or little stuffed animals. The magnet tub is always one of the favorites each year.
Station 3: Technology The students had the option of Kindle Fire Tablets or Laptops. I needed to be at this station to help them understand how to navigate through the apps and websites. It is a slow process, but we are learning. I had wanted to practice number writing with mud bags. However, we do testing next week on the computers, so they really need to practice these technology skills. To create mud bags, I place a small amount of brown finger paint or chocolate pudding in a freezer bag. I squeeze out all the air and tape the bags shut with the 2 inch packing tape. I saved the mud bags for use later. Maybe we will do them tomorrow as they enter. I could call them alligator swamp mud bags!
The day was marvelous. Keep checking back for future letter adventures. I am blogging daily during our alphabet lessons.
