It's Been a Long Time.....

Long time no post... A lot has happened recently.  I am currently off for the remainder of the year.  I had a baby in December and decided to take the rest of the school year to spend it with her.  I took Woogie (our middle child) out of daycare/preschool to stay home with me too.  She has Kindergarten screening next week so we have been practicing our letters and just acting like a normal kid.. She loves to do parking lots.. However, she usually uses one of her princesses to jump in the parking spaces for letter recognition.  Parking Lot Blog Post

Having Woogie home with me has forced me to "attempt" a schedule and routine.. Still working on that one.. I hope to have my day down at least by summer, when all three kids are home!  I noticed that Woogs is a hands on learner.  Much like my older child.  She especially enjoys art.  I decided to take her hands on approach and created a sight word activity paper.  She completes the paper (with help) after she practices it using sand and paint.. See the blog post on initial sight word introduction. Sight Word Blog Post  Her favorite part is stamping the words and drawing the pictures.  I currently have fry's list of words 1-25 completed.  However, I am working on completing the remaining words on the 100 list to post in my Teachers Pay Teachers Store.  Here is a freebie if you want to try it out..

Try it HERE

Making it Fun for the Little Ones!

I work on my school's Title 1 staff as a Reading Specialist.  We have found through the past years that our Kindergarten students are coming to us with much less than what the "state" expects of them.  (Not that I agree with everything the State has pushed, however, I would like to continue to have a job... So I follow the rules and press on.)  Therefore, we as a staff have really focused a big chunk of our day with the young crowd.  I spend over an hour of my day with a small Kindergarten group and then push in for a half hour in two different K classrooms.  I love working with not only the K students but the First graders too.  I just love to see the change they go through-absolutely amazing.   I meet with some fragile learners every morning.  I have to keep things interesting for these little learners.  In the previous post I shared our parking lots we use for learning letters, sounds, and sight words.  They really enjoyed using the parking lots as a quick warm up for our lessons but they were getting a bit bored with that activity.  So I decided to include a day of sight word warm-ups.  Our Kindergarten students are required to know 100 sight words by the end of the year.  For some of our students that goal is a lofty one.  I have four students in my morning remediation group.  Each member of the group has a job to prepare us for the warm-up as it requires a lot of materials.
Here are the materials you will need...

After all materials have been collected, I use a white crayon to write their sight words throughout the page on their notebooks.  Students then paint with water colors to find the sight word.  After the word is found, I give them the entire word on an index card and they write the word in their sand three times while they wait for their page to dry. 

After they write their words three time I cut the words apart and mix up the letters.  By this time the pages are somewhat dry enough for the students to put the words back together and glue them into their notebooks. 

This weekly routine usually takes about fifteen minutes.  After we clean up our materials we come up with sentences with our sight words.  I write the sentences for them and then they read them back to me before they leave.  The following day our warm-up begins with rereading our words, writing them in our palms, then reading the sentences they created.  Then they take a shot at writing a sentence or story with one or more of their sight words and highlighting it in the sentence.
Overall, I really enjoy working with Kindergarten because they love any activity you try with them..