Miss Amy's Schoolhouse

The Daily 5 consists of five literacy centers that are considered the anchor centers.  Each center is designed to function the same, but the activities change.  The centers are:  Read to Self,  Read with a Buddy, Word Work, Writing, and Listening.  The Sisters that created this method outline a day-by-day, week-by-week method of teaching the centers to the class to get started.  These past two weeks we have worked on the basics of a Read-to-Self center.

When I first start teaching the students about how to do Read to Self, we talk about how we can read a book in three ways.  You can imagine the responses from the kindergartners.  They all look at me like I am crazy.  Many of them will start to mutter that they cannot read.  I then tell them that we can read a book in three ways:  read the pictures, retell a story, or read the words.  I stress that we don't need to worry about reading the words right now.  A blessing of the reading series we use at my school is that they come with these really great decodable readers:

Did you notice something?  Yup.  There are no words!  I will pull these books out and we will practice reading the pictures of the books.  It helps the students then make that transition over to the books in the Read to Self area.

Just like every year, this class has its own personality, so we actually spent two weeks breaking down the Read to Self center and what it entails, including on how to pick a "just right" book.  They are doing a fantastic job and I can't wait to see how next week goes when we learn how to Read with a Buddy next week!  As the weeks progress, and I begin to really see who my readers are, I will fill the Read to Self center with books on their levels.  Right now though, I encourage them to bring their readers to the center or look though the books I have place there.  I have chosen books that go with our themes of going to school and all about me right now.  I also make sure that any book I read aloud goes in the center so they can retell it.  And of course, the class books we have made!

Today was our first day of kindergarten for the 2013-2014! It was so much fun!  The children were all sweet and excited to be here.  Today they were strangers, but I know by the end of the year we will be family.

For me, the first day of school is always unique every year.  I try to follow the same plan every year, but I always find something new and different to do.  Like a new management system for lunches or a new way to line up.  Today it was a new way to start off the year writing.

The school that I teach at has very strong academic expectations, especially in writing, which  fits well with the new Common Core emphasis on writing.  This year in my Back-To-School packet I created, I added a writing activity, which now turned into our first class book!  I love doing the class books and especially love at the end of the year when I raffle off the different ones to the students.  What a precious keepsake to have for your lifetime!  Anyway, back to the class book.  I am sharing it with you all, because it was so easy to do and the results were fantastic!

We read the book, Miss Bindergarten Gets Ready For Kindergarten.  It is a great first day of school book to read!  I love it because the pictures are so detailed about all the different things people do to get ready for school!  Plus, the author uses alphabet order for each character, which is really fun as well. After we read the story, I had the class go to free play centers which consisted of legos, books, puzzles, and a special color sheet on which they traced the lines using markers, practicing the fine motor skills.  While the free play centers were happening, I called small groups over to work on the writing page.  I had them draw the pictures describing step by step their own getting ready for kindergarten process.  Then I wrote the caption underneath as they dictated to me what happened.

The results are below!  They did a great job drawing pictures to describe how they got ready for kindergarten that morning.  There were lots of teeth being brushed, lots of pancakes eaten, lots of new backpacks, and lots of car rides to school!  They loved connecting their real-life experience with the book!  Here are the pictures:

I hope you enjoyed seeing their work as much as I did!  I am so excited for this year! Go try this activity with your students!  Happy Writing!

Happy Thursday y'all!

Today's theme that I uploaded to Miss Amy's Schoolhouse Store is based upon one of my favorite series of books: Pete the Cat!  I love Pete because he tackles fears and worries.  He doesn't let the small stuff get to him because he knows in the end, it will all be good.  It is a great series!  Check out the author's website! Watch this video below:




Because of how awesome Pete is, I just had to create some math and language arts activities based on this book!  Every year, I always have a few kids that love Pete.  Last year, I had a little boy love Pete so much that was all he would listen to in the listening center.  In fact, his friends stop going with him there because they couldn't listen to Pete one more time.  :-)  Here are a sample of the activities:

 

I finally finished my whole TpT Back-to School theme using the Common Core Skills.  What is a really neat feature just added to TpT is that you can now find items by the exact common core skill!  Makes searching for that perfect lesson or activity that much quicker!  Here are some previews from the theme: