After reflecting on this week, I have to say that the lessons that I created were quite successful. Yay me! This week I focused on concepts of print, the sections of a book, patterning, and sequencing. Seems like a lot for my kiddies to learn in one week, but they did a very good job. From what I can remember from kindergarten, it seems like children these days are expected to learn so much! But on another note, I recorded myself teaching circle this week and when I watched it back, I felt like I was kind of a scary teacher. I always felt like in the past that I struggled with discipline and had no clue how to attempt classroom management, but this stern voiced Allie was on the screen. Am I too firm with these kiddies? I just feel like for them to understand the behavior that you want from them you need to be clear, bold, and show that you MEAN it with your body language and voice.
Some of my favorite lessons from this week were a fiction/non-fiction discussion, learning to "read", and pumpkin seed counting. When I started to teach my fiction and non-fiction lesson, I noticed that I was not as clear as I could be with the confusing concepts. I chose to start using key words "fake for fiction" and "not fake for non-fiction". That helped me teach and the kids understand the concepts!
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| Fiction and Non-fiction discussion materials This week I also taught my students to "read" in fifteen minutes! Teacher of the decade goes to Allie Angotti.........well, not quite. Only one student in my class can actually read words, but I realized with excitement, visuals and prompting my students can read random letters, animals, and colors using correct reading strategies. I loved seeing the joy on my students faces when I gave them praise and applause for reading all on their own. It made me so happy that they were all clamoring to read again! On Friday, we finally cut open the pumpkin that has been taunting the students all week! Working in small groups, the students estimated the total number of seeds and then each counted the a small group of seeds. The total number was over 300!!!!   |
You win for the most entertaining posts, hands down!
ReplyDeleteI love that you taught them how to read. For kids who grow up in homes where books are valued, and the kids are read to, "pretend" reading is a natural progression for them and leads into real reading with the important skills of understanding the format of a books (L to R, top to bottom, etc.) as well as understanding that the pictures serve as context clues to help tell the story. So, teaching those skills to the kids who don't get that at home is very important. Believing you can read is the first step!