For some reason I just do not LOVE Fall. I don't openly hate it but I just do not have the love affair that it seems like others do with the season. Teaching, however, has slightly changed my stance on the season. I absolutely love planning and developing lessons that incorporate children's interests and currently Fall, Halloween, pumpkins and everything else just brings so much excitement into the classroom.
We read many stories about the season changes as Fall came and another summer said goodbye. It is hard helping children understand seasons in a state that doesn't understand the seasons itself! Using leaf templates, children pinched and glued tissue paper on their leaf before I laminated them. They are currently hanging outside the entrance of our classroom.
My children this year need more phonemic awareness and so I have been building it into any free moment of the day to help develop my literacy learners. We have been working on concept of word. It is amazing how much children can grow in a short period of time and often we miss it because we are so focused on what is next. One of my math lessons this week was for symmetry. Using children's interests in seasonal, one of my team mates and I used the math lesson to develop this lesson for our specific group of children. We came up with children using the words from the literature Go Away Big Green Monster to help address their concept of word. It was so fun to watch children out the words in order, monitor their choices with beginning sounds, and reread to figure out which word came next! When we added eyes and teeth to the monsters, we revisited the symmetry lesson and talked about the placement of the eyes and teeth so the monsters would be symmetrical. Sometimes there are lessons that are fun to develop and plan but it is so rewarding when the lesson goes much better than you could have planned and meaningful learning occurs.
Here is our hallway display of our monsters. The children were so excited to see their working hanging up!
We have been working on number recognition and counting. Some of my children continue to struggle with counting and number recognition because of those tricky teens. Friday, I assigned each of the tables a teen number and gave them the corresponding paper to make a paper chain to represent that number. To help them understand that the teen number is a ten and so many ones, the ten was one color and th ones were another color. I hung the chains over their tables so they will see the chains, number card, and hear those numbers when I call tables. We also practiced sharing, turn taking and cooperation when we made these.
This week, we read stories about spiders as we incorporated fiction and non-fiction text. After listening to A Very Busy Spider, we worked on the sequence of the story using Unifix cubes. We practiced Retelling the story using the different animals in the book. I had a variety of colors picked out and children would identify a color for an animal. At first, it is simple because they pick a color that coordinates with the animal but it gets harder as their color choices are limited. For example, by the time we got to the duck, yellow and orange had already been used. A child picked blue so I prompted them by asking how we could remember blue was for the duck. One child said because the water is blue in the pond they swim in. I was impressed by how well hey remembered their choices for the first time we did this. This is a strategy that we will continue to work on in the coming weeks. As they need less support, we will not rely on the cubes as much. I also have a retelling rope that has knots that we will eventually use to retell stories. One way I use it with the class now is when we retell our important events from our day in sequential order before they chose the best part of their day.
After reading an informational text about spiders, we did this graph. I love graphs and might overuse them but I think there are so many things to be learned from them. When we were counting the number of children who were afraid and were not, I wrote the number above each and one of the boys said that equals 18 because that's how many people are in our class. One of my children was gone that day so it provided an opportunity for in the moment learning and we counted the total. Then another child said well then 4+13=17. Sometimes it is the little things that are exciting!
I am not really sure why but I love candy corn, not just the candy either. Something about the candy brings back some wonderful childhood memories. We talked more about sequence and used the language of first, second, and last to make these candy corn mosaics. One thing that is always interesting is how even given the same directions and materials, you will always have very different end results.
Who doesn't love food? We also used sequence words when we made a candy corn snack! Yum, yum!
One last thing that I have been working on with my kids is having them rate their own learning. My district is using the Marzano model for teacher evaluation and it is a part of that evaluation and an expectation within my school. There are so many different components of this that make it difficult but for me the most important thing is that it is meaningful to my students. Last year, my team made the rating scale more kindergarten friendly as it is modeled after a stop light but another difficulty for my age level is finding ways for them to rate themselves so that you don't lose the attention of the whole group while you are helping them with the process. My team and I came up with putting children's names on magnets and using these almost like exit slips that could be placed on the color they rate themselves. For now, I have been placing the magnets up but eventually hope that children will be independent and able to do this for themselves. We did this when we did a lesson on patterns this week before children went to their tables to make a necklace with cut ou colored straws and yarn. One of my little boys who told me he could make a pattern by himself was just putting random colors in his yarn. I said do you need help and he said yes. When I asked him if he was really green if he needed my help, he said no I am red because I didn't know what to do. I am still figuring out ways to make it work for all of us but this past week was a success. I also have a class checklist that can be filled out for different unit goals so I can track their progress on lessons within that unit to see how they progress.
Does your district or school use Marzano for their teacher evaluation tool? What ways are you using it to meet your children's needs?
Friday marked the end of week 8. It is really hard for me to believe I have almost spent 1/4 of my time with these children already! Where does the time go?
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