Kindergarten

Each semester for school we are to complete 35 hours in a classroom. I happen to be placed in a kindergarten class and I absolutely love it! Not only do I love this grade but the teacher I am with is amazing. I'm hoping I'll be given the opportunity to student teach with her next spring. She's going to be the perfect mentor teacher for me as it seems our philosophies in education are very similar. 

This year has been has been mind-blowing! It's the first time I had the chance to be with the kindergartners from when they first arrived to school to the near end. I can't believe all that they have accomplished. I mean some of these kids went from not knowing letters of the alphabet to reading books! I enjoy the time I get to work one on one with the students, improving their reading and writing skills. Each week I am given a lesson plan with a word chunk focus that I work on with different students. I go onto Pinterest, of course and look up all the different activities that relate to the word chunks. Here are a few of my recreated examples that I did with the students:

When the students did this activity, only the picture would be showing and the word would be covered by folding the paper over and clamping it with a clothes pin. The students knew their focus was on -all words, so they had to look at the picture to figure out what the the -all word was. Once they thought they knew what it was they would make the word then write the word. When they finished making and writing the word they could undo the clothespin to see if they had the correct word. 

Here the students worked with -sh words. They would look at the picture and then write out the word in the sound boxes. I was excited when the students were able to identify the -ar sound in shark because that was a sound we had worked on a few weeks before this.

The students and I had already worked on the -or words, so here the students had to choose if the word had -ar or -or in it by saying the picture that was on the popsicle stick. They would place the clothespin with the star over the -ar or -or. You could make this a self correct activity by placing a red dot on the other side of the popsicle stick behind the correct answer. I'm not a fan of self correct, I would probably have them fill out a graphic organizer and then I'd  look at their answers instead.You can get them from http://www.classroomdiy.com/2013/02/r-controlled-vowel-sticks.html

I also wanted to share what I experienced while at my placement. A couple weeks ago the school had a major water break! Thankfully a church in the community welcomed the students and teachers to resume teaching there for almost two weeks. The teachers did a terrific job with adjusting to their new temporary classrooms. While they weren't quite able to follow the curriculum, they still focused on common core standards. Lets just say I saw adaptation at its finest. The students even did a wonderful job with the adjustment. One student said she wished they could have school at the church everyday.