Life in Kindergarten: Stations Begin!

Last week, we started literacy and math stations. These stations provide children with many different experiences/opportunities to practices skills, letters, numbers, etc. that we have learned. Children work with one other child during station time. Right now, children are visiting one math station and one literacy station a day. As the year progresses, the plan is for children to rotate through two, and sometimes three, stations a day.

Here is a snapshot of our literacy work stations:

Big Book Station

Puzzle Station

Listening Station

Letter Sorting Station

Shared Reading Station

Project Station


Word Work Station

And here is a snapshot of our math work stations:

In addition to daily work stations, we had Reading Workshop, Writing Workshop, and Math each day.

Last week during Reading Workshop we:

added "the" to our word wall. Words that are on our word wall are words that children will see most often when reading a book (high-frequency words). Often times, these words cannot be sounded-out, so children need to learn them by sight.
learned to be word detectives. As word detectives, we can search for words we know, like "a" and "the," while reading a book.
practiced reading books like storytellers. Instead of saying "I see" on every page, we should read the pictures as if it sounds like we are actually reading the words.
made predictions as we read familiar books. When you have read a book before, you can make predictions as you read it again.

Last week during Writing Workshop we:

practiced drawing people. This lesson was planned in response to my observation of many students drawing people with heads and legs, but maybe no arms or body (as an example).
practiced stretching out words. We do this by saying each sound we hear. We then practiced writing one letter for each sound we heard.
learned more about using the alphabet chart as a tool when we are trying to write/spell a word. If we don't know which letter makes a certain sound, we can search our alphabet chart for a picture that starts with the same sound and then write the letter that is above that picture.
worked more on writing stories across multiple pages. When we want to write a story, we think of what happened first and draw/write that on the first page, then picture what happened next and draw/write that on the second page, etc.

Last week during Math we:

learned more about the characteristics of the following shapes: triangle, trapezoid, rhombus, square, and hexagon.
went on a pattern hunt outside! We learned that patterns are all around us.
learned about position words, like below, underneath, and beside.
played oral counting games, Target Number and Follow the Leader. This games help us practice oral counting.
learned a new game, Spin a Number. This game helps us practice reading a number and then moving that many spaces on a game board.