What does recess look like where you live?

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Sight Word Poetry Journals

It has only been one week, but our kindergarten students are doing such a great job with their sight word poetry journals. We practice reading the poem together, identify the sight words and discuss possible illustrations.  Here is an awesome example from one of our students.

The Primary Peach

So excited to become a contributing author over at The Primary Peach.  This is an awesome collaborative blog for Georgia Teachers.

Counting books in the Seesaw App

One of the many reasons that I love the Seesaw app is that I can share items like this with parents.

Flipped Learning Book Study Chapters 5 and 6

 Participating in this book study with my friends Maggie's Kindercorner, Mrs. Price's Kindergators and  Kristen's Kindergarten has sparked such a great dialogue between us.

In my classroom, flipped learning has primarily taken the form of home-to-school projects. For these projects, parents and students were responsible for finding information about a topic.  After a specified period of time, students brought their projects back in and presented the results to their classmates. This is an example of a country project where students researched the country of China and put their information in the form of a poster. 

I have not used writing skeletons, but I do understand how they can be useful when implementing flipped lessons in kindergarten.  Young students may not be able to independently record their ideas in a blog post, but a writing skeleton can make this task a bit easier. It might also be effective with this group to have a short phrase written down and have them fill in the blank. They could use this to help them type a response. 

I think this depends on what you are assessing.  More than likely, younger students are depending on an adult to help them compose and upload their post.  I think that a formative assessment of their posts would not yield an accurate account of what they know on their own. However, assessing older students would capture what they know on their own.

 When I taught third grade, some of my advanced readers were part of a book club that operated like a literature circle. However, we did not have an online component.  I would love to do something similar in kindergarten. My friend Sharon Davison has a Summer Reading Blog for her students.  I love this idea and I thought about creating one for the entire school year. It is a blog specifically set up for students to write about their reading. I absolutely believe that kinders can do this.  They could not only write but post pictures of characters, settings and maybe a pictoral retelling of the story. 

For me, modeling how to interact with the text is crucial if you want students to do the same. Engaging with the text is at the heart of reading. How do you do this? Think alouds are a great way for teachers to make their own thinking visible where students can see the strategy in action.  This poster from Choice Literacy contains the type of information that students might need to help them engage with the text.