Spiders and Pumpkins and Bats. Oh, my!

Our Fall Science Exploration Center is Growing!

 What a BUSY WEEK!!!!  It was Red Ribbon Week and we had activities and assemblies, plus we are getting ready for Halloween.  AND we are also trying to get all of our testing done because we need to be ready to conference with parents beginning on the second week in November, so that means that the children’s report cards must be all done by then.  And in addition to that, I have to be observed doing our new “brain compatible direct instruction lesson” next week on Wednesday, Nov. 2nd.  Oh, and to make things even better, I have a sore throat and lost my voice on Sunday night, so I have been “speechless” since Monday.  But no stress or anything!!!!  (Ugh!  How many times have I asked those children to cover their mouths and not to cough right in my face????)
Okay, take a deep breathe, and just relax....

Also, as I mentioned last week, my kids are now experts at the number Eight Spelling Song, (from Sing and Spell Vol. Five:  Number Words and More Sight Words) and are totally sure that spiders have eight legs, but insects have only six!  Not only that, they can REALLY boogie!  If you don’t believe me, just log on to youtube.com and watch this cute little video of them shaking their stuff; it’s super cute!!!

1.  A Question About the Sounds Fun Materials
This question came up via email, and I thought I would share both the question and answer with you here on the blog.  By the way, that Sounds Fun DVD is now finished and available! And we have a new Workbook coming very soon so watch for that as well.

Question:  I have found your Sounds Fun resource to be so resourceful and helpful.  I have shown it to several K and 1st grade teachers at my school.  They use a Literacy Link program that assigns a hand shape/motion with each letter of the alphabet.  It is very effective and Sounds Fun is the perfect extension.  The K teachers are hesitant to use it because they think it will confuse the kids who don't even know their alphabet yet.  The 1st grade. teachers like it but want to only introduce the picture that goes with the sound they are teaching that week.  The kids I have used it with have no problem learning them all at one time like you show in your video.  Any words of advice as a reading specialist?

Answer:
I have tried it both ways- introducing one sound at a time, and introducing all of them at a time like I did this year and last.  The children don't seem to have any problem with them either way, and even I am surprised at that!  But it just seems to me that when they are BEGGING to learn something,  you might as well teach it.  I still haven't shown them what any of them are for, other than the "th" and the "sh" sound, since we have seen them in words like "she" and "the."  We have also used the "Or Dinosaur" song to spell the word "or."  But as we find the sounds in posters and books, etc., I am showing them how they relate to the poster and the song, and the light is going on.

The love the songs, and they are singing them constantly, even though I don't ask them to!  They latch onto the most repetitive, catchy refrain and just keep singing it over and over and over again as they play until you want to scream at them!  I heard a child singing the other day as he was coloring, "O-R, or!  Just like a dinosaur!  O-R, or!  Just like a dinosaur!"  He must have sang that part of the song to himself twenty times, at least.


My response is this:  Children often don't know that things are "hard" unless we tell them so!  This has been my constant observation over the years.  I have seen them sing songs that are "hard;"  catch on to concepts that are "hard" instantly, such as counting by two's- just by feeding it to them via music and movement that they find entertaining and catchy.  (Consider the "Count by Two's" Song on the Musical Math CD/DVD; it works like a charm.) The brain is a marvelous thing, and the brain in early childhood is an amazing sponge.  If you show them a picture (such as the Sounds Fun flash cards in the video) and it captures their attention, and they are begging to be taught about it- I say, DO IT!  Do it right away, as soon as you can, because that is the optimal moment of teaching!  Their attention is MOST focused at that very moment.  You can wait for another time, but then you will need to artificially recreate that focus, which is harder. 
I have also worried about confusion regarding the other letter sounds, but I have not seen it happen, and I do work in a Title One school with low kids.  So far, as long as I leave the picture/icon attached to the letter combinations, they have not become confused.  But then I am also teaching the words with those digraphs as sight words with songs of their own, such as the "the" song, and the "she" song.  So they have two different ways to approach that word.  They can try to sound it out with the Sounds Fun tool, or they can learn it as a sight word with the song as a tool.  Most of the young children use the song and the shape of the word, I think.  Later, when phonics starts to make more sense to them, the phonetic element starts to kick in as a tool.  So that's how I see it, as a reading specialist.

2.   Science:  Delving Deeper Into Pumpkins!
On Wednesday this week, we said good-bye to our tarantula visitor “Spanky the Spider,” and so I decided to focus more deeply on pumpkins.  We did an experiment to see if a pumpkin would sink or float, and I had the children graph what their predictions would be.  Then I filled big, clear storage tub with water, and I put some pumpkins in it one at a time.  First I put in a large pumpkin, and then when we saw that it floated, I put in a small one and finally a medium sized pumpkin.  Each one floated, and then we talked about why we thought that was the case.  None of the children came up with the idea that there was air inside of it, so I got a couple of balls and put them in the water, too.  Then I asked again why the balls floated.  The children still could not guess it, so I told them that there was air inside the balls, and that there was air in the pumpkins, too!

Will a pumpkin sink or float?

After that, each of the four groups got to carve a pumpkin and scoop out the pulp. This, of course, was wildly exciting!  I took the seeds home and toasted most of them, and then the next day we sampled them and graphed whether or not we liked them.  Amazingly, EVERYONE liked the toasted pumpkin seeds!!!!   Then I put the out the other raw pumpkin seeds that I did not toast for them to touch and explore in the science center.  They kept wanting to eat the raw seeds, too, those silly kids!  I am hoping to try the Oozing Pumpkin experiment that I saw on the Steve Spengler Science Website soon.  Fun!

3.  Halloween Color Words Worksheet (And Guided Drawing, too!)
I was really hoping to squeeze in another guided drawing lesson for the holiday, and so I tried to work a design out at home before I tried to give the lesson at school.  I realized that all I really had to do was put my existing Halloween drawings down on a paper together and make a picture out of them.  And then “it” happened:  I caught a cold and lost my voice, so by Tuesday morning, I was struggling for something to give my kids with a Halloween theme that would keep them happy at my reading table but would not require me to speak.  So I quickly added some color words to the pictures I had put down on the paper, and voilá!  My Halloween color word worksheet was done!  It did the trick, too.  I was able to sit and monitor their work and say very little while they did it, thank goodness!  Click here for the free download of this worksheet.

Halloween Color Words Worksheet

After lunch, I taught the children how to draw that very same drawing, too!  It was fairly successful, but not as successful as the “No, David!” project we did last week.  I think that the reason for this is because I did not think about reminding them to turn their papers to the landscape orientation rather than the horizontal orientation.  I had my example up in front of them and it was turned the correct direction and so I assumed that they would turn theirs that way, too, but NOOOOO!  (Duh!)  Just as soon as I told them to draw their first line, I realized my mistake, but it was too late.  Once again, it always seems just a little bit easier if the first part of the drawing has been started for them.  If I could do it again, I think I would give them a paper with just the fence drawn on ahead of time, or maybe one line of each part of the fence already traced on, etc.  THEN we could be sure that they would start with their papers turned the correct direction, and then there would be room for all of the pumpkins and spiders and cats and things, etc., on their papers.  Getting started right sure makes a difference!

As you can see, some of them turned out better than others.  :)

So on the free download of the Halloween Guided Drawing, I included a master with a traceable fence for those of you that would like to do it that way.  That’s the way I’m going to do it NEXT time, that’s for sure!  Hopefully, it won’t be too late for you to use these resources, perhaps even as a follow-up activity.  Otherwise, save them for next year!
Have fun!
Heidi

Nine Weeks Down: A Bulletin Board, a Guided Drawing Project, and More!

Take a Hayride to the Pumpkin Patch!

 Well, I was barely at school this week due to being sent off to a district inservice on Tuesday and Wednesday.  I learned how to give a direct instruction lesson.  (You see, I am a brand new teacher, ha ha.)  I was back just in time on Thursday for our Great American Shake Out, in which my kids made their mark on society by being the only class to sing practically the entire time they were out there!  They sang the refrain from the Zero the Hero Song from Sing and Spell Vol. Five (just the “Z-E-R-O, ZERO the HERO!” part) over and over and over and over ad nauseum until I was getting dirty looks from some of the teachers and smiles from many of the parents that happened to be there.  We had only sung it twice up to that point, (and not at all since Monday,) so all I could do was shrug and say, “I guess the lesson stuck....”  :)  When we got back into the classroom, I asked the children, "So how do you spell the word zero?"  Luckily, most of them immediately replied, "Z-E-R-O!"  Phew!  I was afraid that after all of that, I would get a bunch of blank looks that could only happen in a moment "a la Kindergarten," LOL!


 Have a great weekend and a wonderful week coming up!  I hope that we get something productive done next week, other than just thinking about ghosts, goblins, and jack-o-lanterns all week long.  :)


1.  A “Hayride to the Pumpkin Patch” Bulletin Board
A couple of weeks ago, our school was asked to decorate the district office board room with student work, so I decided to create something special for my contribution.  One of my favorite teachers with the cutest ideas is Kim Jordano, and so I looked at her website for some ideas.  She has a really cute idea for a “Jungle Cruise” bulletin board, so I took my inspiration from that and decided to create the same type of thing, but with a farm theme, and this bulletin board is how it turned out.  My class wound up making two complete sets of these bulletin boards so that there would be one for the district office and one for my room, but I think it was worth it.  The instructions are included today as a free download.  I hope you enjoy it! 

Meanwhile, my class finished up their Farm Song Book (from Little Songs for Language Arts and Printable Projects for Singable Books) and had their annual Farm Day this week, too!  I wish I could have been there to see them riding the ponies and petting the animals, but alas!  I was stuck in a district training instead.  (Sigh....)


2.  Guided Drawing:  David Shannon’s No, David!

If you have been reading my blog for a couple of years, you will remember me blogging about this activity before!  You can find the directions for this guided drawing activity on this blog entry here.  Well, it has been a while since I have done this activity again, but we did it again last week.  To introduce the activity, I read them a little “David Goes to the Computer Lab” guided drawing book that I had made with my class and saved all the way back from 1999-2000!  The funny thing is that when I read it to them, I began to notice that the names on the pictures were familiar, and then I heard some giggling at the back of the room.  It was coming from the daughter of my instructional aide, Sarah!  Sarah was in my Kindergarten class in 1999-2000, and she is now in high school!

Sarah and Taylor in April, 2000.  So cute!

She burst out with the comment, “That is TOTALLY my PICTURE!!!!  I REMEMBER drawing that!”  Then everybody started laughing!  It was pretty funny!  So my aide, Rachel, managed to round up a picture of her daughter Sarah when she was in Kindergarten, and we have scanned it so that you can see

Sarah and Taylor in October, 2012!

Sarah now.  She is still friends with the little girl that is sitting next to her in the picture, so we invited her to come down and pose for a picture with her, just for fun.  Time sure flies!!!!!

 Last time, I did it in small groups, but this time I did it as a whole group.  It was our first guided drawing project of the year, and I am always a bit nervous about how it is going to go, because the tendency is for kids to grab that paper and pen and immediately start drawing without waiting for directions.  (I try to show them what we are going to do, and then REMOVE THE PICTURE and tell them we will do it just one step at a time, and they can only do what I do, and NOT draw ahead of me!)  I prepped them as much as I could for it, but two of them went right off and started trying to draw David without waiting for me, of COURSE.  But at least it was only two of the 23 children.  Once I stopped them before they got too far and then got the whole group going on a step by step basis, it went just great!  We did the drawing on the first day, and the coloring on the second day.  And I did do the coloring as guided coloring, and told them that since we were going to make it into a book, they would need to color it exactly as I said, and could only use the colors that I told them to use. 

Guided coloring is not something I normally do- and it is not something I even enjoy doing!  BUT- if you want David to look like David Shannon’s David character, he has to be colored in that same way, or it will look just like any other little boy, so that is what I told them, and there wasn’t any complaining- this time! 
Next, we are going to have them dictate a sentence about what they think David might do wrong in the classroom if he were here.  So the sentence would be something like, “No, David!  Don’t run inside!”  Then we’ll make it into another class book, but this one will be our own version of “David Goes to School.”  I had wanted to make one about David going to the farm, but since I was out this week for those meetings, it just didn’t work out.  :(

"David" is not so hard to draw after all!

 
3.  A Science Center- Our Tarantula, “Spanky” the Spider!

Spanky the Spider

I am starting to fall in love with the idea of borrowed class pets!  I contacted a friend of mine that teaches biology at the high school nearby, and asked her if she had a tarantula that we could borrow to observe in my classroom during the week before Halloween.  It turned out that she did not have one, but she put a note up on her board, and by the end of the day, she had four different offers of tarantula loans from her students!  And one of them really didn’t even want her spider anymore, so she thought that would be the perfect one!  She offered it to me permanently, but I politely declined.... :)  I really only wanted to borrow it for a little bit and then send it back.  And this arrangement is really great!  She has sent her students down to clean the tank, and even showed up once to do it herself.  She also provided the crickets that he ate.  The children have been enthralled, as you can imagine, and it has prompted a lot of questions and interest in spiders in general.  We have read lots of

books about them, and the children have spent lots of time gazing at him in wonder!  We have also written about him,  as you can see in the picture.  We have been concentrating on writing phonetically, listening for all of the sounds that we can hear in the words that we want to write, and trying to get them down on paper.  We also have tried to draw pictures of spiders as they really are, which is difficult, since children already have definite ideas about what a spider looks like, never mind what they really see right there in front of them!  By the way, turning the document camera on the spider (still in the tank, of course!) has been a great way for everyone to see what is happening.  I also took some little videos of the spider with my

iPhone after the children left (since that is when he started moving around more) and then played the video back by placing the iPhone right under the document camera!  It worked just fine.  Some of the children actually thought they were watching the spider move in real time.  :)  We have also been having a grand old time singing the Halloween Song, Making the Halloween Song Book (scroll down to find both), and also singing the Eight Song from Sing and Spell Volume Five, which talks about the eight legs on the spider over and over.  Now all of my kids know that there are eight legs on a spider.  That was easy!

I think that the best thing about borrowing a class pet is that around the time they start to lose interest, I will get to give it back.  AND, it’s FREE!  What do you think about that????  I highly recommend getting friendly with your nearest neighborhood high school teacher with a lot of animals in her classroom.  Or, you might even consider asking the local pet store if you can borrow any of their reptiles or pets for a week!  Another idea would be to post a notice on any social media you use, such as Facebook, and see if anyone is willing to let you borrow their small animals for a short time.

My friend, Mrs. Black, says that we can continue to borrow animals for as long as we like.  But then I taught two of her daughters in my class before, so that probably helps her willingness to be of assistance, LOL!  I put an optional assignment in the homework for next week to have the children look for and bring in any harmless spiders that they may find around their homes too, so we'll see how that goes.  I'm sure that you can do these very same activities with any spiders.  They would just be smaller and therefore harder to see.

4.  A Halloween Reading Book

Here is a little gem I made up a couple of years ago, and then promptly forgot all about!  But at the time, I had decorated it with D.J. Inkers clip art, which made it impossible for me to share with you anyway.  However, the other day, I walked into a team mate’s classroom, and there on her table was this little book I had written and I thought, "A-HA!  I should get that out and do it again!"  And then I realized that I could easily share it on my blog by just replacing the artwork with my own, which I do have now, but didn’t have before.   

So this is how I use this book, and other printable books like it.  I take an index card and a black permanent marker and write some sight words on it that come up often in that book.  Then I take some crayons and color each of those words different colors.  I tell the children that their job is to find each of those sight words on the page and color them the different colors shown on the index card.  I find that this activity really helps kids focus on word boundries quite a bit.  Once they do that, they can really tell you how many words are in a sentence, too.  At the beginning of the year, it helps a lot to have a separate index card for each child so that they can put the card right next to the book and match it to the words exactly, so you have to save time for this prep work.  Later in the year, two kids seem to be able to handle sharing one card, so you can get by with prepping fewer cards.
 

As the children were coloring and finding the words, I stopped just ONE of the children and asked him or her to read me the book.  I really found this to be a great management tool, since it allowed me to focus on just one child at a time and listen to him or her read.  In each group, I was able to listen to all five or six children read the whole book in the twenty minutes that we had, and all of the children did finish finding all of the words in the book, so it worked out well.  I highly recommend using printable books like this!  Plus, the children that finished finding the sight words enjoyed coloring their books while they waited for their peers to finish.  A couple of them even finished coloring it and were ready for something else, so I gave them my iPad to work on.  They sure are loving that!

Eight Weeks Down: The Sounds Fun DVD is Finally HERE!

It has been good to be back to normal in my classroom for a full week now with no interruptions!  Other than a burned bag of popcorn that set off the fire alarm, it has been an uneventful week, thank goodness!  (And I’m happy to say that is was NOT my popcorn, either!)
That’s all good, because next week on Tuesday, we are having our annual Farm Day, in which farm animals will come to our school for the children to meet and ride.  And Wednesday is picture day, and we all know how that event throws the children into a dither!  Thursday is the "Great American Shake-Out," which is a very large, formal disaster drill with a big duck and cover exercise to prepare for earthquakes or some other horrible disaster.  We always get stuck outside for at least a half an hour while the whole district (and in fact much of the state!) goes through the motions of what we would do in a real disaster.  But the biggest problem is that I will have to miss BOTH the farm day and picture day because I am being sent to a required district training on both days, and I am NOT a happy camper to think of being gone on those days!  I can only imagine what kind of hyperactivity I will be walking into when I return on Thursday- neverMIND the Shake-Out!.  And I really hate the thought of missing such a special day as the Farm Day.  If I could think of a way to get out of that training, I would, but I was ill last year when the rest of the team went.  So now I am the last one in Kindergarten to be trained, and there is no avoiding it now, unfortunately.  It looks like soon I will learning how to "RISE;" though it remains to be seen if I will actually "shine" as well, LOL!



1.  The Sounds Fun DVD is finally HERE!
Yes folks, the Sounds Fun DVD is finally here, and is posted for sale on the website! 
Although the real reason I wrote the song was to help the children learn the “sh” sound, my class has been singing the “Sh” song since the beginning of the school year as a classroom management tool for getting the children to settle down.  However, we have been singing it with the CD or just acappella (with no CD at all.)  So when I brought out the DVD and put it on our big screen, the kids were SO excited!  They were just singing their hearts out, and that was nice!  But the thing that I really didn’t expect was that they started insisting on hearing and singing the other songs that they were seeing on the “Single Songs” menu.  The thing that surprised me a lot was that they were absolutely LOVING the songs, even though I hadn’t introduced a single one, and that doesn’t always happen at all!  There were shouts of “Let’s hear the dinosaur song!”  And “I want the doggie song!”  “How about the “Th” song?”  I think that they would have gone on and on with it for quite a while, but frankly, I was TIRED!  And- the next thing I knew, the “O-R Dinosaur” song came in handy when we were trying to sound out the words “trick or treat!”  I pointed out that it was just like the dinosaur song, and that it was spelled “O-R.”  They caught on to that right away, and made use of it.  Then they sang it over and over (and over and over) in line for lunch, much to the dismay of the cashier!  But they only sang part of it, just “O-R, or!  Just like a dinosaur!” ad nauseum until the cashier finally called a halt to it, poor thing!  Even a few of the kids from the other Kindergarten classes had start to join in, and they had no idea what song the other children were even singing!
In any case, I hope you enjoy this little video of my class singing along with this brand new Sounds Fun DVD on our big screen.  I also posted another clip of them singing on my HeidiSongs Facebook page earlier this week, so feel free to check that out, too! 

2.  Color Word Letter Sort
A few years ago, I developed this activity when I was trying to have the children look for certain letters of the alphabet in environmental print, such as magazines and newspapers.  The problem that we were having was that the children who came to the center first would tend to find the majority of the largest and “best” letters in the magazines, and by the time the last group came to the center, there was almost nothing left in those magazines for them to cut out and sort!  So I decided to solve this problem by printing out some words in large print that would be meaningful to them- namely, the color words printed in color!
In the activity, children can cut the letters apart and sort them by the letter of the alphabet.  This is meant to mimic the activity in which children search for large letters in environmental print, such as magazines and newspapers. For children that are learning to read the color words, these words qualify as environmental print for them.  It also helps them focus on each letter found in each word, and they often sing the color word songs in HeidiSongs Sing and Spell Vol. 2 as they sort.  My kids really enjoyed it, and I am including it as a free download here for you today!!

Preparation:
1.  Copy the word “red” onto red construction paper, the word “blue” onto blue construction paper, etc.  You will need about three to four words per child minimum.  I usually duplicate more than enough and save the extras to use the following year, or share them with another class.
2.  Cut the words apart so that each child can choose and cut out one word at a time.
3.  Put the words into baskets, and place glue and scissors on the table as well in preparation.
4.  Duplicate one of each of the Alphabet Glue-On pages, and pin or tape them onto a nearby wall so that the children will be able to reach them easily to glue on their letters.  (You may want to have an extra copy of the letter Ee page, because this one tends to get filled up and then you may need an extra.)
5.  When you are done, you may want to discuss with the children why there is nothing glued on to the letter Qq page, etc.  Have fun!       

My Fall Leaf Science Center!

3.  Leaves and Pumpkins Investigation Center
I have set myself the goal of doing an actual GOOD job with science this year (!) and one of the things that I am going to try to do is have an independent science center going all of the time.  So for my first science center, I have decided to start with something simple:  just fall leaves, and pumpkins, two different types of magnifying glasses, and a variety of fiction and nonfiction books on the topic.  I think that once they figure out how to use those magnifying glasses, they might actually get something out of it!  They keep holding them way too close to their eyes, and I can’t imagine that they are seeing anything more than they usually do; and perhaps, they are actually seeing less! :) 
I have read a few of the books to them, and on Thursday I cut open one of the very small pumpkins that grew in our class garden and let them start touch the pulp so that they could feel it and investigate it in a more hands on way.  I think it was a success!  The kids really did seem interested in all of the leaves and pumpkins, and did spend a good amount of time there looking at everything and enjoying the books.  Next week I am going to have them bring in more leaves that they find around their homes, and also let them record what they see on paper with crayons and also with some pumpkin and leaf rubber stamps that I found at a craft store.
  Stay tuned for more science centers!  And please tell me about your favorites, because I have always felt that science was my weakest subject! 
FYI, I am now enjoying following two science blogs, though they are not necessarily Kindergarten focused:  Little Miss Hypothesis, and Science Gal.  Check them out, they have some great ideas!



4.  Working on Rhyming Words
Sometimes it feels like teaching a four year old to rhyme is like trying to teach him to pull a rabbit out of his hat, but he is not wearing a hat, and he also has never heard of a rabbit before!  And -if memory serves me correctly- I have seven children in my Kindergarten class that will not turn five until sometime this fall between September first and December second.  So that is at least seven children that are completely mystified by the concept, plus the usual few more that really could be developmentally ready, but whose parents haven’t been reading to them, etc., so this is all brand new.  We have done GOBS of rhyming activities, including reading tons of rhyming stories, listen for rhyming words here and there, have puppets say rhyming words, and play my Rhyming Bingo game.  I also made a Power Point drill for them to help them practice the rhyming words, and that helped a lot until they got tired of it.  And now, we are halfway done with our Rhyme Song Book, and I think it is really starting to take effect!  Of course, a bunch of those younger children are also now just turning five, so it COULD be a coincidence, but I prefer to think of it as good, strategic teaching! 
We have been singing and dancing the Rhyme Song every day from Little Songs for Language Arts, and they have been doing one page per day as well.  We have two more pages to go, and I think that they now have the book memorized.  One good thing about using the

book in conjunction with the Rhyming Bingo game is that the pairs that they are memorizing do not match, and I really like that!  For example, in the bingo game, top rhymes with cop, but in the song, top rhymes with mop.  So there was a lot of discussion about which was the “right answer,” and once again I explained that there are MANY correct answers where rhyme is concerned!  And this time, I think they finally GOT it! 
One thing that I do not like about the rhyme book is that it does require a lot of prep work in that someone has to glue down the flaps ahead of time for the children, since it is a lift the flap book.  But this year, the class next door to mine decided to go ahead and make the projects side by rather than under flaps, and that worked just fine, I’m happy to say!  And I do hope that the children’s rhyming assessment goes well.  At this point, about half of the class has passed with flying colors, and the rest of them still need work- but I haven’t checked on this for about two weeks.  Time will tell!   

5. Testing, Testing, Never Resting
Question:  “How do you do report card assessment? I hate assessments and feel like I always put it off until the last minute because it is forever long.   Looking for some new ideas.”

This question came up on my Facebook page, and I thought that it would make a good blog topic. 
I assess the children on each skill just as soon as I am done teaching it. So this week, we are just finishing up teaching sorting, so we are assessing it now. I'll keep working on it with those that didn't pass, and try to get their parents to keep working on it, too.  Also, as an example, this week I retested the children on their letters and sounds.  I sent home some short notes written on index cards with the few children that are still have a few letters and sounds left to learn, and handed these notes to their parents as they picked their children up after school.  I simply made a quick list on the index card that said something like, “Kimberly:  Capitals:  P, M, N, Q.  Lower case:  n, u, r.  Sounds:  e.  Then I quickly handed it to the parent and said something like, “Hey, these are the letters and sounds your child still needs to learn.  Can you help her with them?”  I think that this sort of thing helps a lot, and is well worth my time!  I also updated their RAN boards if they were in my tutoring group, and sent a copy of that board home.  (See this blog entry on RAN boards if you are unfamiliar.)

Keep those testing supplies handy for whenever you have a moment!

So basically, I am constantly assessing even though it might be way too early to think about report cards!  I always keep parents informed of how the kids are doing (as much as I can), and then try to assess the children that didn't get a certain skill one last time again right before report cards go out.  I have parent volunteers keep "tutoring" the kids on those concepts that are difficult for them, too.  So
hopefully, most of my kids will pass most of the benchmarks.  That's my goal.   
One advantage that I think this system has for parents is that they may get a couple of short progress reports with some small, do-able goals as opposed one big report card with a (surprise!) LONG list of goals that may seem insurmountable due to its length.  With my system, very little of the information on the report card should really be a surprise.  It should all be “old news,” and something that you have already discussed with most parents at least briefly at the door upon dismissal, etc.

Seven Weeks Down: More Fun With Counting Creatures, iPad Apps, and More!

Well, I am happy to say that this week was as easy as last week was hard!  As difficult as it is to be out of the classroom, once you are there and just sitting, it can be pretty darned relaxing to just let someone else do the thinking and then go home.  So that is what I did on both Monday and Tuesday at my district inservice that I had to go to.  And yes, parts of it were boring and seemed pointless for me as a Kindergarten teacher, but on the other hand, I was NOT physically exhausted at the end of the day!  Wednesday and Thursday were Minimum Days for parent conferences, and Friday was a non-student day for the same reason.  But the Kinder teachers had already conferenced with every parent during the month of September, so we are off the hook for parent conferences until November, when we will conference again with all of them.  So as Pete the Cat would say, “It’s all good!”

 Also, just so you know, I posted a video on my HeidiSongs Facebook page of my tutoring group working on the alphabet using some of those little tricks I told you about in my blog entry last week, so if you are interested in seeing a demo of that, check it out!



1.  More Fun With Counting Creatures
I mentioned last week that I introduced the Counting Creatures, and the children are still having a ball with them!  (To find them, go to this link and SCROLL DOWN!)  I keep thinking that they will get tired of clapping out the poem and coloring those poem pages at playtime, but so far, interest in this has only diminished slightly!  It makes me very glad that I have that download on my classroom computer, because I just keep printing out whatever pages the children want to color each day.  :)

In any case, at the math table this week I had the children working on some of the “count and draw” pages included in the book.  I put copies of the pages into some dry erase sleeves and had the children take turns rolling a die to decide how many objects we would color.  For example, how many teeth would we draw on Creature Number Five or wheels on Robot Number Six?  First, we practiced drawing them together (and adding a numeral to the page as well) on the large format pages with dry erase markers.  Then later as a large group, I had the children try to draw the objects independently on their own pages with a pencil and let them color them if they chose to do so.  I am including a couple of these pages as a free download this week for you, just in case you might like to try this yourself!  The top half of my class did this task with minimal problems, but some of the younger children with the fall birthdays were having quite a difficult time relating the numeral to the correct number of objects!  I don’t know why this sort of thing surprises me year after year, but it always does!

I decided to make a game out of it by having them roll a die to see which number of objects we would draw each time.  So if we rolled a number one, everyone drew one object, and wrote a number one by it.  No problem!  We rolled a number two, and everyone drew two objects and wrote a number two by them.  Then we rolled a number five, and several children drew MANY objects on their papers- maybe ten or more- and had no idea at all that they had made a mistake!  OR- they rolled a four and draw five things, and simply couldn’t figure out that they needed to erase one.  OR- they rolled a four and drew three things, and could not figure out that they needed one to draw one more thing.  The good thing was that those that already had it down were able to draw and doodle on the Counting Creatures in the Dry Erase Sleeves, so that worked out very well.  I just kept some extra ones handy, since I assumed that this would happen, and I’m very glad that I did.

Clearly, the children that are “stuck” at this stage need more practice with real objects, and more counting in general.  They also need to transfer what they know with manipulatives to paper.  As I watch the videos of myself giving the lessons, the first thing that strikes me (other than “Oh, God- I need to lose weight!) is that I should have gotten out some blocks and had them place the blocks on the paper FIRST.  Then I should have had them remove the blocks one at a time and draw one item for each block; that would have done the trick, at least for the time being.  I’m sure that the children that are not quite ready for this activity would need a lot more of this sort of thing before they will really understand it and truly be developmentally ready to transfer what they know with manipulatives to paper, but I know that the practice is good for them, and that they did enjoy the activity.  The extra practice with the fine motor skills is also welcome!  Incidentally, watching yourself give a lesson is a really interesting (though potentially intimidating) way to analyze your own teaching!  Truthfully, I had no idea what I had done wrong or how to fix the problem until I watched the movies of the lessons, and then it occurred to me that I needed the concrete objects. 

And at this stage in my career, I should know this by now.  Duh!

Of course, the ones that are past this stage really could move past that and work on something more challenging.  How to combine those two levels at once?  That is the question....  I may let the more advanced ones in a group play some of the problem solving games on my iPad and iPod while I work with the ones that are struggling.  The children are getting really good at playing these games without any adult intervention, so this little plan just might work!  I’ll be letting you know.  And speaking of technology....

2.  A Couple of New iPad Apps to Try!
It rained this week in Southern California, and this made it impossible for us to have our normal day of motor development activities as part of our Wednesday small group rotation, since all of that happens outside.  So I as I was to scrambling to think of something else for the children to do at that center, it occurred to me that the five or six children in the group could probably take turns playing games on my iPad and iPod, as long as there was one other thing for them to do as well while they waited.  I did have one parent volunteer there at that center, so I let her manage those three activities.  The children were either playing a game called “Short Vowels” on the iPad, “I Write Words” on the iPod, or were matching sets with number cards while they waited for a turn to play one of these games.   We have also tried a few games with parent volunteers at other times over the past couple of weeks.  So here is a quick review on each of these games:


“Feed Me!” by PencilBot Preschool- FREE!
My kids REALLY liked this simple app, in which a lovable little monster asks you to feed him an upper or lower case letter to match the one that he is daydreaming of!  All the children have to do is drag the letter to the monster’s mouth to feed it to him.  It works well on both the iPad and the iPod, and it’s FREE! 

"ABC Alphabet Phonics" by Fliplog.com $2.99.
A nice app for practicing the alphabet and its sounds, but a bit over priced at $2.99; I think it would be more appropriately priced at $1.99 considering what it does.  There is a free version, but I felt compelled enough by the free one to buy the purchased app instead. 

I Write Words-  Free!  (We used this on the iPod, but it works on both iPad and iPod)
You trace each letter of a word by pushing the crab around with your finger.  The letters form a word.  Then you tilt the tablet so that all three letters fall into the spinning flower in the bottom corner, and you are given the next word.  A nice app, but this is ALL that it does.

"ABC Coloring"- by Abitalk- Free!
On this one, the kids choose a color to fill in each section.  They can fill it in with any color they choose.  However, on some of the pictures, they didn't think too hard about where they put all of those letters!  But most of them are very good, particularly since this is a FREE app!  But... sometimes it can be hard to tell which letters are the capitals and which are the lower case- even for an adult.  For example, there isn’t much of a visual difference between the capital K and the lower case K, etc. 


"My First Puzzles:  Dinosaurs"   $1.99
    This app gives you lots of different dinosaur puzzles to solve.  The only thing is that you could do them all and then run out of puzzles to solve.  Good for the first half of the Kindergarten year.

"Park Math" by Duck Duck Moose  $1.99
    This helps kids learn counting, patterning, sequencing, problem solving with addition and subtraction.  Problem solving example:  If two more ducks climb up, how many will be at the top?  We have only tried the patterning section of this game, but they did very well with it, and enjoyed it a lot.


ABC Phonics Short Vowel Words (by Abitalk) - Free!
All you do is click on the fish that have the short vowel in the middle that they are asking for, and the little submarine shoots it down.  But that is ALL that it does.  The idea that this helps kids practice reading words with short vowels is a fallacy, in my opinion, because my kids loved this game and only one of them can read any short vowel words.  My helper told them to “find a word with an A in the middle,” etc.  They liked to touch the word and watch it explode as the submarine shot it down.  So it is really about visual discrimination. 

Interestingly enough, nobody complained about having the smaller iPod as compared to the larger iPad, and that really surprised me.  I was getting really “brave” and let the children play with both the iPad and the iPod during playtime, and two children were playing with this same app at the same time, and loving it.  I didn’t think I would be able to walk away from them to solve problems while they were playing with these items, but I did, and nothing bad happened at all!  I also assumed that I would have a LONG line of children waiting for a turn to play, and this would cause problems in itself, but apparently, these “digital natives” are familiar enough with technology that this didn’t happen at all- thank goodness!  Years ago, I would have about five children or more who would spend their entire playtime waiting in line to play games on the computer, and would not play with blocks or anything else while they waited- even if I promised to call them when it was their turn!  So I finally turned off the computers completely during playtime because I felt strongly that this was NOT the best use of their time at all.  I’m happy to see that things have changed! 

3.  Learning the Word “My” with Alphabet Pattern Blocks!

One thing that I always enjoy doing with my class is having them make words with my Alphabet Pattern Blocks, and  having them glue the paper pattern blocks down so that they can take the word home.  This time, rather than do it at the art table, we did it at my language arts table so that I could
more closely supervise the activity and work with them a little bit on it.  I’m so glad that I got the chance to do that, and I video taped the activity to share it with you here!  To prepare, I had copied the black and white version of the M and the Y pattern blocks and had volunteers glue them down on a large piece of construction paper.  I also got the paper pattern blocks cut out.  Luckily, we have a die cut machine with all of the different pattern blocks cut outs to make it a little easier to get them cut out, but in the past I have had parent volunteers cut out the blocks.  I find that it works especially well to give this sort of thing to parents that want to help prepare things at home because they do not have time to help out during the day.

 For the lesson, first we sang the “My” song from Sing and Spell Vol. 1, and then we started gluing down the paper pattern blocks.  I combined math with the lesson by asking them to tell me the shapes as we went along, and also kept asking them to tell me the letter names as well.  When we were done, I also tried to find the time to ask each child what word it was, and perhaps to sing me the “My” song and point to each letter as we sang it.  I think that they really enjoyed it, and I do hope that their “work of art” winds up on a wall in their homes so that they can read again many times!  I also told them to sing their parents the “My” song lots of times when they got home.