It's Apple Season in Kinderland!

This week we celebrated the start of Fall with Johnny Appleseed's birthday and an apple theme! One of my lessons for this week was creating apple prints with the students and also incorporating sentence writing. It was definitely a trial and error process! This activity showed me that prior to a messy lesson you should practice at home so you are confident when you create with the kiddies. My students were given the task of choosing between the colors red, yellow, or green and they then had to write the sentence " NAME likes COLOR apples in Fall." This one of the students' first experience with writing on a line and A LOT of erasing occurred at my station. But that is OK!! Though some students eventually wrote their sentence after basically erasing a hole in their paper.....others needed a little extra help. For those students, I wrote out the sentence in highlight and they had to trace the pre-written words. I was pretty impressed with my on-the-spot differentiation idea!

After a month of allowing the students to sit where they please at circle time......that time has come to a beautiful end. Some students just cannot sit next to each other because of incessant chatting, touching, or fighting. Asking my students to sit still for 30 minutes is so challenging for them! I am hoping that my assigned seats will delete some fidgets and chatting issues.

As my time for full time teaching and starting my research project comes close, I am getting excited! I will definitely need to start pre-planning my activities so I am not completely overwhelmed in the next few weeks. Here's to a happy new week and the start of October!!

Just another week in crazy kindergarten....

Well I survived another week with these hyper kiddos, I'm pretty sure that chocolate milk should be served at a minimum in the public school system. This week it seems like we are starting to realize that our students struggle to listen, follow directions, or zip their lips. It is getting quite frustrating because it seems like it takes so long to do anything! From lining up to packing up backpacks, conversations constantly occur and the students fail to follow simple directions that we have been explaining for three weeks. What is the problem?????? To start, we moved a few students to different tables and this seemed to solve a few chatting issues. Tattling and the "blurts" are getting out of control....ugh. When a child comes up to you and says, " I have something REALLY important to tell you!", you usually assume that someone is bleeding in the hallway or a child has just lost a limb. But, alas, it is 99.9% a tattle. We had a conversation about tattles, but I think I need to move on to the next level.

Blurting is also an issue with my kinders..... they always seem to bubbling up with thoughts that just rush out of their mouths. Distracting, distracting, distracting. Once one student bursts the blurt bubble, then the rest of the children freely release their blurts. NO MORE!  I have developed a blurt chart which will hopefully erase the blurt issue. Each child's name is on a chart and if they blurt three or more times before recess, they must stand on the wall for 3 minutes. This will be my first week of trying this out, so I am sure it will be a learning experience for both the students and me. Some of my frequent blurters are typically all green light students, so I can assume that some tears will be shed.

First tooth lost at school! 

My last few weeks

Well apparently I have forgotten to blog for the last few weeks so I will just write one giant blog to make up for it.... :) Kindergarten is basically everything that I expected it to be and I love it, even though it really is so much work. After the first few weeks of school, I felt like going to sleep at about 8:30 every night and I felt quite disorganized and overwhelmed. I feel like I slowly getting into my stride because I know the routines, writing out lesson plans is becoming more simple and like second nature, and the children are becoming more independent as the weeks roll on.
The concepts that I have been focusing on are:
- the alphabet and letter sounds
-numbers,counting, and how to write numbers
- colors and how to mix colors to create new ones
- rhyming words and how to produce rhymes
- student writing their names in different forms ( using environmental print, cut up pieces of paper, etc)

Maddy's name mosaic 

I feel that so far my lessons have gone pretty darn well and the fact that we use station rotations really helps with tweaking my lessons throughout the morning. I usually always start with the RED group of students and they are excellent listeners and a higher group of children, so I know if something does not work for them that I definitely need to adjust the material for the other children. I still do find it challenging to provide the extra one-on-one attention for the ELL children throughout my lessons because the other students need my assistance as well. I think I need to grow a few more pairs of arms to meet this balancing challenge. From what I expected, the students seem to absolutely love any activity that involves moving around the room, competition games, or using crafting materials. Who know that musical chairs and paint would delight the students so much!!

Becoming color mixing scientists!

Another interesting thing that I am noticing is that your attitude as a teacher has a major affect on the students' interest and enthusiasm for the lesson. I usually try to use silly voices, different inflections, and excitement when explaining the lessons and I can definitely see that if I am excited about the lessons then the students become very pumped up! Acting like a crazy clown when you are reading a story sky rockets their engagement. Lucky for me that acting like a crazy clown comes naturally for me :) 

Carlos' perfectly painted chameleon from " A Color of his Own"


For my action research, I have decided to focus on the effects of interactive read alouds on students' acquisition and comprehension of vocabulary words. Starting in October, I will be choosing approximately four "sophisticated" story books which will be used in my study. I am curious to see how many extra words that students will learn if they are more actively involved in the read aloud process. I am also hoping that this action research project will not eat me alive like the one that I struggled through last year in fourth grade.