Who am I?

Inferring is a tough skill especially for kinders since they don't do so good with the abstract. I created a lesson where I first the book "Whose tail is this?" by Peg Hall and Ken Landmark. They have a bunch of books Whose nose, whose eyes, etc.

 

We read and talk about how when we infer we put two things together. First we have clues in the book in the words and pictures and then we also have our schema (things we already know about in our brain) and when we read we have to put those things together.

These students said that the clues were the eyes and the whiskers so they wrote "I think is a cat"

So then I passed out pictures of close up images of animals and the pairs could write and draw on the sticky notes about what they were thinking.  Then each pair got to present what they thought and at the bottom I out the zoomed out picture.

Lessons Learned - Make sure there are enough clues in the pictures. Some of the pictures were too hard because they were too close up.

100 Days....A Little Late

So these were back in February here are a few things we did for the 100th day of school.

We finished our puzzle.

You'll notice it looks a little funky in the middle. I had a sub for a couple of days and I had trouble getting things to line up after that for a while. This is something that I will be doing again because the kids loved it.

We wrote 100 words. This was a good time filler for those early finishers. Many worked on and off throughout the day.

We found kisses hidden in the room and matched the numbers on the bottom to a hundreds chart. (Got this idea from mailbox magazine)

I know we made crowns but I have no pictures without kids faces :(

P is for Penguin

I started this post last month and then my laptop decided it didn't want to work. I know that everyone has moved on from winter but i thought i'd put the up anyway.

I saw these cute penguins on Keen on Kindergarten and since we happened to be studying P last week I thought it would be a fun project and a great assessment of motor skills.While making them a couple of kids kept asking about feet and so I just gave them some orange paper and let them go to town.

Alphabet Soup

One thing I mentioned in this post about letters was alphabet soup. This is a fun game I play each day to introduce the letters and is something that will transfer to my ABC center.

I use a pot from my housekeeping center and have the bag of letters ready to go. I scoop out the letter and the letter of the day goes on the left and any others go on the right. This is just a cookies sheet from the Dollar Tree with a piece of masking tape down the middle. I am thinking about adding a small yes and happy face to the left and an x with no on the right.

 

After we finish sorting we count the capital letters and lowercase and then how many together. We may also go over the letters on the other side.

Introducing Letters

I found this awesome blog post that I want to incorporate into our Welcome to Kindergarten theme where we introduce the alphabet. We do one letter a day and I really like how this teacher uses their student's names.

I got my class list and found out that I have FIVE letter A names so we will see what happens when school starts.

Felt Letter Tiles

So my new favorite website is http://pinterest.com/. I think it is a great way to bookmark cool ideas from other teachers, plus you can add a picture for all us visual people out there.


So one of the first projects I added while trolling the internet were these ABC Felt Tiles.

So on one of my many trips to the Dollar Tree I spotted sheets of Felt and picked up the puffy paint from AC Moore and one REALLY HOT Saturday afternoon later I had these...

My first use for them will be for students to make their name in my Making Words center.  I will make some black felt strips for them to make their names on.