Common Core and Nursery Rhymes

I've been thinking a lot about the Common Core Units that are becoming more popular out there lately.  Last year, our district purchased a lot of books to align with these Common Core Units but did not provide us with any real guidance about how to implement the units- should we give up what we're doing and use these books/units exclusively, do we use them as extra, do we have to follow the sequence of the units, how do these units tie in with our curriculum maps??? We were filled with questions and, quite frankly, we still are.  But Unit 1 is called A Colorful Time with Rhythm and Rhyme and it has a lot of nursery rhymes.  I like teaching nursery rhymes in the beginning weeks of kindergarten so it really fits right in.  Last year, I copied several nursery rhymes on sentence strips and each week we had one in a pocket chart.  It became a shared reading for us and a work station as well.  So, now I decided to type them up and make them look a little prettier.  So, here's a link to my first one I've done- Jack and Jill.  http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Nursery-Rhymes-Jack-and-Jill-Pocket-Chart-Activity    I have plans (and cute graphics thanks to www.digiwebstudio.com) for many more.  It's designed for a pocket chart and you can use the version that has each individual word in a text box or the version with phrases.  There's also a page at the end that can become part of a poetry notebook where the children illustrate the nursery rhyme. 

Cheers!
Karla

School's Out for Summer

Wow!  It's hard to believe that the end of the year has come.  Thursday was our last day!  It was a bittersweet moment saying goodbye to all my little kinder kiddos who have come so far and accomplished so much this year!  I think about them at the beginning and am amazed at all they have learned this year! 
I hope to relax a little bit this summer, play a lot of baseball with my son in the wee hours of the morning when it is still cool enough to do things outside (I live in Arizona),  read some good books, make some things to sell at TpT and plan for the next year.

In between, I will try to blog a little about the teacher resource books I have on my reading list...
Happy Summer Everyone!

Fairy Tales and Maps

Wow, the end of the year is upon us and I have had literally no time to post anything.  We're finishing the end of our fairy tale unit and I also incorporate maps into the unit.  Here's a link to a blank map of Little Red Riding Hood's forest.  https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B4suMYsG-K9oT3RMNGhjZHk3VW8  We made the key together and then the kiddo decided themselves where to put everything.  We also did this with The Three Billy Goats Gruff.  Here's the blank map I gave them for that one. https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B4suMYsG-K9oNThDTHhwWV9mN0U  Below are some student samples.

Motion Freebie!

My kinders love the Read It, Trace It, Put the sentence together activities.  We sometimes do them as morning work, but they are also a part of one of my work stations.  I made one for Motion- focusing on Push and Pull.  My plan for this is to collect them when we've done and few of them and then put them together to make a Push/Pull book.  It would have the sentences the kiddos did and then at the end I want to have them draw things they push and things they pull.  That's one of the things we're doing today as a wrap up of our mini-motion unit.  I'll post a couple of pictures of the final product, but here's the link to the Freebie sentences. https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B4suMYsG-K9oZEFXNW11V0MwaXc  Enjoy!  And, if you like this one, please see my TpT site where I have many different themes.

Digital tools

As a Kindergarten team, we've talked a little about how to teach Common Core Standard W6- With guidance and support from adults, explore a variety of digital tools to produce and publish writing, including collaboration with peers.  We've struggled a bit with this because we don't go to the computer lab and, if we did, how effective would it be trying to teach 28 kinders at a time anything in the lab?  We talked about using buddy classrooms to work together to create something, but I don't have a buddy classroom this year.  So, I haven't been able to do a good job with teaching that standard. 
Yesterday I decided to try to use the ActivInspire program we have with our Smart Boards to write and illustrate our version of The Little Red Hen.  We wrote the story together and then I taught them how to draw the first page.  Then children took turns coming up and drawing different pieces of the story.  Here are some pictures that show them in action.

How are other kinder teachers teaching that particular standard?  I would love to hear some ideas!

Motion

Part of our science curriculum has us teaching about motion... specifically "push and pull" as it says in our standards.  As I am reading Deanna Jump's blog today she mentions teaching "big words" to kinders as part of a unit.  She mentions the vocabulary of insects specifically.  Someone was questioning her use of "big words".  I am a huge supporter of teaching the vocabulary of instruction and not "dumbing down" (for lack of a better term) words and vocabulary simply because I am teaching little ones.  So it made me feel good reading this because today we learned about "forces" and "inertia" and we used those words along with "push" and "pull".  We explored with cups, geometric shapes, ramps, cars and even my son's Beyblades (tops).  Here are some pictures of our explorations.  Not the best action pictures, but the kiddos are seeing if objects spin, slide or roll.  Great fun!

My Beanstalk

Okay, finally got a picture of my beanstalk.  I took my sequencing sentence strips and hot glued them to the beanstalk.  Then at one of my work stations, students can read the story from the beanstalk.  The beginning of the story is too tall to point to but they all know the story from memory by now.