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!
