A Peek at Our Week!

Isn’t it always fun to take a peek into other teachers’ classrooms? I love doing it! I have been secretly stalking Mrs. Will’s Peek at My Week Linky Party since she started, and I’ve never had the guts to link up. But I all of a sudden was inspired this week, so I made sure to take lots of pictures so I can show you what we did LAST week!

I also always get tons of questions about how we “fit it all in” since we are half-day kinder, so hopefully this answers those questions! Just so you know, we have “science week” about every other month where we dedicate a whole week to our science units. We then sprinkle in other science, crafts, social studies and health throughout our language arts and math units.

Okay, let’s talk about last week!

We start our day off with some morning work and then we work on our literacy centers. During centers, I am able to pull small groups of students to work on specific needs. We practice letter sounds, segmenting words, phonics skills, and guided writing.

During guided writing last week, we focused on using our sight words to build a sentence. We focused on the words “I” and “see”. Sometimes during guided writing we use the cut and paste sentences, and sometimes we just fold paper into parts and write each word in the correct box.

While I am working with a small group, the rest of the students on working on these centers.

Two students visit the listening center, two students get to paint and one student uses the iPad. The rest of the kiddos choose from a center tub. {almost all of our center work is in write and wipe pockets so that they can be re-used multiple times and we save on paper!}

At the ABC center, we worked on letter formation.

At the stamping center, we worked on stamping upper & lowercase letters.

At the word work center, we practiced beginning sounds. The students matched the picture on the lunchbox with the letter on the backpack and then recorded what they found.

We are also worked on matching uppercase and lowercase letters.

At the handwriting center, we reviewed our focus letter from last week, as well as practiced our current focus letter.

At the sight word center, we are practiced using our new sight words to build sentences.

The next hour is our literacy block. Last week we worked on correctly forming the the letter Mm. We follow the Handwriting Without Tears curriculum to teach our letters. The students love the little letter chants and it really helps them remember how to write the letters correctly.

We also practiced our new sight word “see”. You can read more about how we teach sight words {here}.

Now let’s take a look at reading groups!

The first 15 minutes is a whole group lesson. We usually read a story from our Houghton Mifflin curriculum, or work on a phonics skill. The next 45 minutes we run three rotations. We are able to split our classes by ability level so that each group gets to work on the skills they need. Our rotations are about 12 minutes long so that we have time to clean up and rotate in between.

The first rotation is reading with the teacher. We use phonics books from Houghton Mifflin which incorporate the sight words and phonics rules we’re learning.

The second rotation is run by our amazingly wonderful classroom aide. Last week the students worked on the letter Mm.

The third rotation is either run by a parent volunteer, or completed independently. Since we don’t always have a volunteer, this means the activities have to be self explanatory and easy enough to be done without constant direction 😉 Last week we practiced writing the letter Mm.

Our Houghton Mifflin story from earlier in the week was about fish, so we created a fish scene and used our sight word “see” to complete the sentence.

We also worked on sorting beginning sounds using this print and go activity.

{are you tired yet?? I’m exhausted!}

During math, we finished up our unit on sorting, completed our Halloween graph, and introduced our new unit on position words.

We made this super cute and fun bee book from Kindergarten Crayons. I had an abundance of bee stickers {#hoarder} so we stuck them on the end of a popsicle stick and used it to tell the story while practicing our position words. The kiddos loved it!

After our whole group math, we chose math centers to work on.

We practiced one-to-one correspondence and fine motor skills by counting apples on the tree.

We worked on counting on using pumpkin numbers.

We also counted and graphed candy dice.

We practiced building our numbers using play-doh.

And finally, we used our number stamps.

After math, the early birds go to snack and recess and the late birds start school. We mirror our day from the morning, so late birds start with math.

Then all of our students come together for calendar time.

After calendar, the early birds go home and the late birds go to snack and recess. We finish off our day with our literacy stations and reading groups again with the late birds.

It is short, quick and exhausting, but we sure do have a lot of fun!