I am very glad to be a Hominy Valley Elementary this year. We are off to a great start! I have gotten to know a lot of our students here. I am looking forward to a continued year full of learning! What do you look forward to learning this school year?
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As a kindergarten teacher, I have a unique opportunity to educate, share, engage, enhance and model ways that a variety of technological tools can help my students, their families and others make connections globally in regards to learning.
I have been blogging for four years now with 5- and 6-year-old children. I manage four blogs: a classroom blog, life science blog, summer blog and a WordPress blog where I reflect on my teaching. I am also in my third year of using Kidblog. This way my students are able to create and design their own blog posts in regards to what they are learning and exploring in kindergarten. Blogging has been both inspirational and rewarding. My students, their families and others that we connect with make meaningful connections through our learning. Why blog with young children? How do I know it is making an impact? Here are some top reasons:
Sharon E. Davison teaches kindergarten at Allen Brook School in Williston, Vt. She recently was recognized as a VT IGNITED Teacher, an award given to teachers who are transformative and innovative. Read her blog and follow her on Twitter @kkidsinvt. How to Make Graphs
http://larremoreteachertips.blogspot.com/2014_02_01_archive.html http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Close-Reading-For-Kindergarten-First-Grade-February-March-Special-Edition-1072458
http://www.miss-kindergarten.com/2011/12/great-ideas-for-teaching-in-january.html
Great December Kindergarten Blog!
http://kinderblogger.wordpress.com/2010/12/ I am new to Kindergarten. I've taught first grade for two years and this is my first year in Kindergarten. I dreaded the fact that I had to teach "small moments" to my students. I thought "They can't even write the letters, how are they going to write about a small moment?" Someone recommended the book, Talking, Drawing, Writing: Lessons for Our Youngest Writers by Martha Horn and Mary Ellen Giacobble. It starts with the basics of storytelling and drawing people. I was amazed and relieved that drawing is the beginning of writing. My students have just finished up a narrative unit. There drawings of their stories we're just amazing!
Today, we started a math unit on shape so I thought it would be fun for my students to make the shapes in shaving cream! I gave them two rules: you have to listen and stop when I tell you to do so and you can't keep rubbing the shaving cream because you'll rub it away. We first made shapes in the shaving cream, then I decided to do the alphabet. I wanted to show the students how to make the letters slowly so I use the Clay Alphabet Wigglies video on you tube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUcSoUC-9pc Then, I could pause it and talk about the formation of the letters. The kids loved it and did a good job. I was thinking I could do this every Friday!
I love apps gone free! It's a must! Everyone must get it! You get free apps that cost free with daily update reminders. I also suggest apps gone free for my parents when they ask how can they help.
I like free apps but one I would definitely purchase Zombies vs. Literacy $1.99 It teaches word families and as you "fight" zombies with your reading skills, your "brain" gets bigger and bigger that the zombies can't eat you! How cool is that! It's going to be hard to top that! But...there also is a spelling bee app created by Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee. There's a grammar app which is an useful app that looks at grammar and punctuation. I found tons of elementary apps but not a lot of middle school targeted apps. I'm disappointed in that. Some elementary apps I found are the reading rockets app that has it's own apps from concepts of print to comprehension to writing. Josh and Emma Go to the Beach teaches primary colors, numbers, and objects. There's a Mad Libs app that is just like :real" mad libs and it's free. You can pay for more stories or even email and share stories with friends. I found an app called Reading for kids: 100 ways to Encourage Your child to read which is an app for parents and educators to motivate kids to read. After reviewing all these apps I have no doubt that apps are the key to reading motivation in students! I found Read Me Stories-30 Book Library. Smarty Pants School which included assessments. Teach Me Kindergarten which is exactly what it says and you can upload your photo with your friends and be in the same class! Gulliver's Travels app with illustrations and narration. I even checked to see if Pintrest had an suggestions for apps and boy did they! I found apps on Pintrest for creating books, dictation, and apps to help students with dysgraphia, writing, difficulties, and struggling readers. Wikibrains is a cool app for brainstorming. There are running record apps. Talking WeeMee is for reading fluency where you can make your own rock star avatar and looked similar to guitar hero! I even found digital storytelling apps! There's apps for Using iPads to Support Literacy Instruction in the Classroom and fluency, such as reader's theater. You can download the scripts from www.thebestclass.org, where you can find many free scripts. Then, input them into an app called puppet pals. Puppet Pal will also making the readers theater into a running record for fluency. iprompt is an app that works as a teleprompter to help in fluency and reading readers theater. There's Apps That Support Grammar Instruction such as analogy, which incorporates patterns and picture analogies just like the Miller Analogies Test. I've played bluster before and it covers everything from homophones to prefixes and affixes. I found that the Raz-Kids app is free! Raz-Kids gives students access to leveled books online from books a-z! Board is personalized spelling practice and instruction. There's all kinds of app that support sight word, letter/sound, and Phonemic Awareness/Phonics instruction. I found great reading apps for kids such as Tikatok StorySpark from Barns & Nobel Kids write and illustrate their own books, using a catalog of art or their own photos or digital drawings for the backgrounds. When it’s ready, books are “published” under a chosen pen name and posted online at Tikatok.com. iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, Android; app is free, books are $3 each. With Bookster, young readers can find new literary favorites with helpful narration from kids their age. Little ones will also learn vocabulary and can record themselves reading the books when they've finished! Tales2Go has more than 1,000 stories. A Story Before Bed has more than 300 stories in this app and you can record a video of reading during story time so that you can watch it again in the morning, while paging through and following along! TouchyBooks has Quirky sounds, animation, and flip-book usability offer a realistic experience and a touch of magic for toddlers and teens. MeeGenius. highlights words for review and you can use the MeeGenius audio playback to keep your child engaged. A child can substitute his or her own name for that of a favorite character in the book! There's Elmo loves ABCS and Bob Book app. Tons of learn to read apps such as Duck's Alphabet, Learn with Homer, and ItzaZoo which is a very engaging way learn-to-read game incorporates your drawings. There's Leap Pad apps and Martha Speaks app. I found that there is no excuse for reading motivation with all these apps! There's an Montessori app and a reading rainbow app. The electric company has an app. There's a reading tutor app and a PBS kids app. Cosmos Chaos is an Imaginative sci-fi app that builds vocabulary. Barnes and Nobel even has an app for kids. There's an Learn To Read Kids Reading ereader App. Reading Rockets has a writing app for kids. Write About This is an outstanding app for teaching and practicing writing skills. It’s great for a very wide range of ages and abilities, and will provide hours and hours of productive practice. Storybook Maker is an app with endless writing possibilities. Writing Magic Letters:: Kids Learn to Write is more than just letter tracing, Writing Magic Letters, requires children to use their problem solving skills during the game portion of the app. App includes only lower case letters. Little Writer is a fun and positive way to help younger children learn and understand correct letter, number, and basic shape formations. Shake-a-Phrase is a best app because it gives children inspiration to start writing, plus quizzes them on verbs, nouns and adjectives. There's tons of great and free apps! I was just really blown away by what's out there! I used an app called Toontastic last year with my first graders and I use Shrek Toontastic this year with my Kindergarteners. It is a story sequencing app and then students can choose the characters emotion, setting, action, and then, record they're narration of the story. I always have my students play back the story the create for the class. It also helps because at my school we have 2nd load and it's a great small group time filler. So, yesterday during our writing time, I tried this thing called a Language Experience Approach or LEA. There's lots of research done on this by Morris and Slavin. I borrowed the book Chalk by Bill Thompson. It's a wordless picture book. I was wondering how this would work considering I'm trying to teach my Kindergarteners to read yet, I'm using a book with no words. But anyway, we "read" the book 3 times. First, I just turned the pages slowly letting the students just look at the pictures. They were quite engaged and surprising quiet while doing so. Second, we "read" it again. This time we told what was going on in each picture. Third, we "read" it again but this time I wrote down what the students told me that was going on in the pictures. We ended up with an incredible story, where the chalk dinosaur came alive! I even had a student asked, "Why didn't they just draw the dinosaur smaller then he could have tried to eat them." What an imagination?! We read the story that we had written a couple of times practicing concept of word. Then, I got extra copies of the book and had the students at their table groups "read/retell" the story to each other. I made a big deal about how they are reading the book. The students loved it! I am now a HUGE fan of the Language Experience Approach! Pics to come!
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AuthorI am a Special Education Teacher who has also taught Kindergarten and 1st grade for 5 years. Archives
September 2017
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