Recap of week 2- Friendship and Perseverance!

Well hello there!  I hope your school year is off an away to great places!  I have to be honest and say this week wasn’t too awful hard for me… we had Monday off and professional development on Tuesday!  So, it was a *short* week!  Now let’s see if I can remember what it’s like to handle a full week! 🙂  This week was all about FRIENDSHIP!  We read the book Huggapotamus and I paired it with Little Smudge and The Crayon Box That Talked!  All of these books are so great and especially for this time of the year!  We are trying to teach those “life expectations” like sharing, making friends, being kind…and when you’re able to teach through books it seems to make a bigger impact! 
To go along with The Crayon Box That Talked we made our own classroom crayon box!  “We are the same.  We are unique!”

For the hour I have slotted for guided reading and daily five we continued to build our reading stamina!  By Friday we were up to a solid ten minutes! YAY!  Just a quick tip that you might already be doing, but make sure your kiddos have 3-4 “good” books with LOTS of pictures and be sure to swap these books out each night.  I just take the books from each tub and mix match them around!  Just imagine being five and expected to look at the same books for ten minutes everyday…. BORING 😉
We are also STILL reviewing our four main “rules” for daily five… read quietly, get started right away, stay in one spot, and read the whole time!

We were also able to move on to our next daily five- – work on writing!  We established the norms for this daily five and practiced working in our writing folders for the same amount of stamina we had met during that day’s read to self time!
After we practiced building stamina for read to self and work on writing we then moved on to Whole Group Guided Reading!  I know I say this about a lot of packets I’ve made, but I seriously *love* this packet!  It’s so perfect for this time of the year…and totally knocks the belief that kinders can’t “read” until they know their letters/sounds!  The books/reading 1:1 strips are predictable and the kids love to read them over and over again!  Also, all of the easy readers and reading strips DO have the 1:1 black dots under each picture/word…this helps build that oh so important skill of one to one correspondence!

Each day I start the lesson following the planned phonemic awareness and pulling out a BIG book to read and point out key text details!

Here is a look at the 1:1 reading strips!  The kiddos will read them 2-3 times and then switch out from their table’s stack of additional strips!  I then let them color the pictures before taking them home!
There are also these matching follow-up sheets!  I love having the kiddos work on these, but they are not necessary for your kiddos to still benefit from the packet!
This week was also an exciting week because we started KinderPhonics!  The kiddos are also so eager to start learning letters!  We also are working hard on the handwriting prompts for each letter…and of course with the help of Leap Frog Letter Factory we are picking up on our letter sounds too!
Here we are meeting Tad and the Leap Frog crew on day one! 🙂
 This week I also did my persevere lesson!  I started this three years ago, but each year it’s just as sweet as before!  Something about this lesson sticks with the kiddos and they hopefully never forget what it means to persevere…even when they leave my classroom! 🙂  You can watch the lesson below!  To prep for the lesson I simply placed a bag of suckers inside a box and wrapped it many times!

And a look at the aftermath….

Yep!  Lesson approved!

With Friday being September 11th we also took some time to remember… of course these sweet and innocent kiddos don’t need to know everything that happened that sad September day, but we feel that we should help them to be aware of the countless people that risked their lives and some that still are! #neverforget

In writing we continue to chug, chug, chug along!  We’re talking about adding additional details to our stories and using our sight word for the week, like, to write stories!

In math we continued to work on numbers 1-5!  These rainbow writing number sheets were a hit!

Alright, that’s all I have for your today!  This upcoming week is apples week!  You can check those plans by clicking below!  Have a SUPER week!

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16 Comments

  1. Absolutely love the perserverance lesson! So many of my Kinders are going straight to the "I can't do it!" and some of them have seen that they can once they try but I think they still need to build up their self-esteem! And I think that lesson would be perfect!!!

  2. Love this! Your ideas are always great! Quick question… are the writing practice sheets in your store? I love how you have all of the different a words! It's like their own little dictionary 🙂

  8. I’m searching for the letters for “persevere”. I saw it on someone’s post and they said they got it from your blog. I’ve enjoyed reading through your blog and have gotten off track several times reading about other topics there. I’ve purchased several of your products on tpt and know your work is excellent! I’ll probably spend many more hours reading your blog, but I’m not sure I’ll ever find the “persevere” sign. So, I thought I would just go ahead and ask you about it. Thank you for your help.

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