Happy End of Vacation!

Hopefully you got in some family fun time during our week away from school. I’ve been doing a lot of reading and working over vacation, and woke up this morning with excitement about starting back with our class tomorrow. I want our end of the year to be memorable, for both personal reasons and to bring our class closer together.  I’m going to do it with fun, enthusiasm and laughter – the way Kindergarten is meant to be.  I hope you will join with me during this special time. I am looking forward to a wonderful end of our learning year. Stay tuned for information about special events!

To begin, I’m starting with doing something I have always wanted to do, but because of its timing, I always miss it. It is the NAEYC’s (National Association for the Education of Young Children) Week of the Young Child – A celebration of our youngest learners. It was supposed to be the week before April vacation, but our class is going to celebrate this coming week.

Here’s the plan:

Monday is Music Monday – we’ll sing songs and enjoy old favorites from the year… silly songs a must!
Tuesday is Try It Tuesday – we’ll play some new team building games outside (or inside – weather looks iffy)
Wednesday is Work Together Wednesday – we’ll build with blocks, create things and use our STEM knowledge
Thursday is Artsy Thursday – We love a good crafter-noon! I know Mrs. Detrich will help us think of something awesome to make!
Friday is Family Friday – We will share stories and pictures of our families.

For more about The Week of the Young Child click the link to the NAEYC’s website. There’s a also a great parenting blog with lots of information. Here’s a link to an article about the importance of play. This should be a fun theme to get us back into the groove after vacation and transition us into the end of our year. I am looking forward to a great rest of our year together.

Be well. Enjoy them – they are only little for so long!
Ms. Purdin 🙂

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This semester I am taking two courses. One is the state mandated course on teaching practices to help ELL (English Language Learners) students and the other is a course on advanced curriculum design for my Educational leadership degree. While both require work, I have found myself enjoying the experiences of each and seeing the changes they bring to our daily lessons in class.

Important words and phrases pulled from text

The ELL course focuses on vocabulary development, which has reinvigorated me in teaching new words and phrases. Kindergarten students love words! They love finding words, hearing words, playing with words, seeing words they recognize in books and most of all, knowing words. Spring is always a fun time in Kindergarten  because this is when all the knowledge we have been working on begins to synthesize together. They become more confident writers, readers and explorers of language.

The children sorted the words into three different categories.

To finish off our bear unit, we read some non-fiction about bears. Before reading the text, I gave the children all the words I thought they should know in the text. We listed them and then I put them on post it notes and the children had to sort them into categories. This strategy is called Category Sort and was very powerful. It accessed their prior knowledge and made them think about how the words were connected to one another. I am planning on using this strategy again with more content areas.

A poem we read this week. We found all the digraphs!

April is poetry month and I am looking forward to working with this type of writing with our students. We will be reading poems about many spring things such as rain, clouds, rainbows and mud. We may even do some writing and responding to the poems we read. It should be exciting!

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