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.

LITERACY CENTERS: our names

Since January our center's work was mainly based on our names:

There is no better way to introduce kids to the concept of sounds than through their names. Their name is the only "possession" they bring to school, their names is what makes them special so anything we do in class involving their names is sure to get their attention.

The first activity you can see here was done with half of the class (not a center activity really). They got their magnetic letters, boards and name cards and explored how to build their names:

After this we added the activity to the literacy center and introduced the concept of writing. Kids were asked to write their name if they wanted to. We want them to understand from the very  beginning that anything they write will be well written, we want them to have confidence.

As they very interested in building and writing their names we added this game to our literacy center:
They have to build their name and then write it. At the beginning we used the letters cards we use in 4 and 5 but they were to difficult to clean up so we came back to using magnetic letters:

A great sensory game is building their names with plasticine:

Some kids wanted to proved their knowledge of everybody's names so we introduced this game that we usually have in 4: kids have to relate pictures to names.

AS you can see from the pictures, kids are at different stages in their learning process and it is extremely important to give them what they need, if the want to write more names they have the possibility, if they just want to pile up letters they are respected.