Blends

We are in the midst of teaching our little ones about beginning blends.  This week we focus on R blends.  Our district purchased curriculum has nothing for blends. Honestly, I cannot remember the last time I used a piece of district adopted curriculum. So it is up to us to create activities to practice blends.  Along the line of Words Their Way sorts, I created these sorts for students to do to practice.  I also made sorts for the Smart Board using Smart Notebook software and a page called the Vortex- pictures of all this in action tomorrow.

Click here to get this freebie that includes six r blends. My team and I are looking forward to use these activities to help our students differentiate between the single consonant sound and the consonant blend.

American Symbols

We just finished a little unit on American Symbols.  The idea of a symbol is a very difficult concept for kinders to understand.  And, it is equally difficult for them to understand big words like freedom, strength, justice etc...  But we used these Welcome Book that are part of our Common Core book tubs.  They didn't totally understand the concepts, but it's a beginning.  American Symbols are taught in 1st grade as well, so we did a good job of providing a beginning knowledge base on which 1st grade can expand.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Bald-Eagle-Welcome-Books/dp/0516278746/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1392510825&sr=8-2&keywords=american+symbols

These books are pretty good about giving very basic information about the American Symbols.  Then I also used my Read It, Trace It, Put the Sentence Together packet for American symbols.  These were at my Theme Station during our Literacy Stations. Get a part of it free here.

 Then to tie it into informational writing I created these pages that we did after we read each book and talked about each symbol.  We would create circle maps or tree maps together after reading the books.  Then the students would write about the symbols. Get the freebie here.

Included is the Liberty Bell, the Bald Eagle, the Statue of Liberty, the flag, and the White House.  I used our informational writing proficiency scale to grade their writing.  And, then, of course, we did a craft activity for each of the symbols. It's a fun little unit to do right before President's Day.

Opinion Writing in Kindergarten

Kindergarteners love to tell what they think about things and they have opinions about everything!  The tricky part is harnessing those opinions and writing them down to satisfy the common core standard W1.  We've been using proficiency scales in our classroom a lot this year and my team created a proficiency scale for Opinion Writing.

So, we have this to work from when we revisit opinion writing.  But, it's such a broad type of writing and I wanted to start with small topics that I can use when I teach the proficiency scale to the students.  So I created this packet of easy to use opinion journal pages.  The first week I will use the easier ones about favorite foods and fun things.

The second week it will be when we read Dr. Seuss books and we will do some opinion writing that connect to some of the books we're going to read.

After that, we'll see where the unit takes us.  But this will hopefully be a good start for us.  To get this freebie that includes ALL these samples and more, click here.  Would love to hear your OPINION about the best way to teach this type of writing with our little ones.

New Year Put Together Sentences

Here's another freebie from my store that I just posted.  These sentences are great for morning work or a writing station.  Students read the sentence, write (or trace) it and then cut apart the words at the bottom and rearrange them in the correct order.  Finally, they draw a picture to illustrate it.  It comes with both the tracing version and the blank line version.

Compare Word Problems & the Matching Strategy

Once upon a time, a long time ago in my previous life in another school district, I participated in some research through ASU.  My team teacher and I (we were teaching 1st grade) had a professor from ASU who came in to watch us teach math, specifically, word problems.  He was looking at "children's mathematical thinking" and their "mathematical talk."  We would pose problems to the students, let them choose their tools for solving the word problems (manipulatives, pictures etc...) and then we would reconvene and share their thinking on the overhead projector (see- I told you it was a long time ago).  Well, as we were doing this, the students discovered the matching strategy.  I can't remember if it was during a Compare Difference Unknown word problem or if it just came up during something else.  Once that strategy was introduced, students started using it ALL the time.  They solved almost every word problem using the matching strategy.  It was crazy- they loved that strategy and used it for everything whether or not the problem was a compare type problem or not.

So, every year when I get ready to introduce K.CC.C.6 Identify whether the number of objects in one group is greater than, less than, or equal to the number of objects in another group, e.g., by using matching and counting strategies- I worry that the students will overgeneralize with this strategy.

Usually I have nothing to worry about because the kinders usually struggle with compare word problems.  They forget the question and just want to join the two group together even after doing lots of hands-on activities where were are comparing tower sizes. Here are two things I am using to help teach this standard this year.  This game is in my Kindergarten Math Assessments but I gave it a new, winter twist.  In this game, students play in pairs and take a strip of snowmen.  Then they use a matching board to compare the snowmen.  The idea is that they match them up on the board and the "extras" are the "How many more?"  Here's the link to this freebie.

Then I also created some Compare Difference Unknown word problems using a format that is floating around our school (but modified for Kindergarten).  Hopefully, using this format the kinders will keep track of what they know and what they are trying to answer.  Here's the link to this freebie.

Happy Matching!

January Math Stations

January's Math stations are finished!  Now I just need to copy, laminate and cut them out! Addition and subtraction is such a big focus when we go back in January- in fact, that's all we do the rest of the year.  So this month's stations focus heavily on addition and subtraction concepts.  Here's a fun freebie that's part of the product. It's called Spin and Count and once the students get used to it, it's lots of fun.  But you have to play it a lot in whole group/small group before it becomes an independent station.  Check out the pictures of it below and click the link to get the freebie.  Spin and Count FREEBIE  And click here to find the product at my TpT store.

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/January-Math-Stations-1028864

After Christmas Sale!

I'm having a sale on all Winter products at my Teachers Pay Teachers store.  Stop on by and look for January and Winter Products on sale December 26-28th.  KinderKarla's Store

Hope you find something you can use!