LITERACY CENTER IN KINDER 4

During these months we have been exploring lots of different literacy materials both in the center and in group activities guided by the teacher:


- PRE WRITING PRACTICE WITH SAND
Writing shapes and letters with their fingers is very important to help kids understand how letters are built as well as getting used to directionality.

You can get the pre-writing cards here.
The letter cards here.  

 - LETTER HUNT
Using rice trays and list of words kids explore finding letters and placing them on the mats. We help them be aware of letters in words.

- RHYMING MATS
Working on rhyming is vital in kindergarten to help kids get a good phonological awareness. When older kids have problems reading or writing they may as well have problems with rhyming.

The rhyming mats 

- BEGINNING SOUNDS: SOUND MONSTER AND DOMINOS
When we start working on phonological awareness beginning sounds are a great way to start.
We usually do it with the sound monster: kids feed him with the beginning sound we are working on. Later on they have to find the sound in any part of the word. 

The beginning sound cards

dominos

- SEGMENTING CVC WORDS
The ability to segment words is crucial in order to be able to read and write. We star by segmenting syllables, then onset and rhymes and finally kids can be ready to segment sound by sound. 

We work segmenting through elkonin boxes, first by jumping hoops and later on using sound mats. 

- WRITING.
In the kinder 4 class, we star writing as soon as they want to, our intention is helping them see that they are capable of writing amd that writing is communication.
In the morning routines everybody segments words for the helper to write on the board.
On monday, if they want to we help them write about  their weekend.

MORE LITERACY CENTERS IN THE 4 YEAR OLD CLASSROOM.

I want to show you two literacy centers we have been working on lately:

The first one is our improvement of our SHAKE THE WORD game:
now we work on it as an independent center were in groups kids shake the dice, read the words and write them down on their papers: They are doing a great job with very little control from me, I can't be more proud of them.

Our second center is a building words center:

each of these little boxes has lots of laminated letters so the kids can play building words.

We first played with the whole group, making the rules clear and then we added to the literacy center for them to play in pairs:

jungle week 2: SNAKES

This week of learning and discoverying has been incredible. I'm sooo proud of these little ones:

We started by talking about snakes and discussing what they can do, what they have and how they are. Our students use of the language has increased a lot because they felt very comfortable with the structures.

after doing this in the big poster we completed a worksheet by glueing pictures. (no letters allowed hehe)

we learned about curves through snakes bodies and symmetries:

 

 we used our crafts to decorate the class jungle.

                                     we love coloring jungles at the computers room:

our main and most important work this week had to do with literacy:

we did "the aligator chomp" syllable sort activity by Deanna  Jump:

we also play a game where we had to take a jungle animal beginning with a specific sound from a cauldron.

we did two writing activities for the first time and the results were incredible:

The first one was a shared writing activity were we completed blanks on a text about snakes. The helper was doing it on a big paper on the board while the rest were doing it on their own papers and i was helping writing the sounds and words on the board.

ARENT THEY BRILLIANT? I'M SO PROUD!!!

We wanted them to discover the practice of free writing, because they think they can't write until they know how. The intention of this activity, as the intention of any free writing activity, is for the kids to write whatever they want about snakes, in this case, and everything they do is correct because we are, first of all practicing and second of all because we are evaluating fluency not efficiency, and of course free writing can happen wherever you feel confortable ( on the floor, at the table... )

We were expecting lines and circles, or letters with no relation and maybe some words.
This is what we got:

our english as a second language kids writing:

I'M THRILLED TO SEE THIS:

Next week is monkeys' week, carnival on friday and home for a week for our carnival holidays!!