Every spring, my students read to the kindergarten children to show off their newly acquired reading skills. This is a highly anticipated event as they all remember being read to when THEY were in kindergarten.
The students justifiably felt very proud of what they have accomplished in reading this year!
In our classroom, we do a lot of reading. We read to ourselves, we read all together and we listen to good readers read. We also read to our friends. This is what that looked like today.
Kim Cooper Skyped into our classroom today to help the students learn to hear rhymes in text. She read a rhyming book and asked the students to tell her the words on each page that rhymed. It was tricky, but the students got better at hearing the rhymes as the book progressed.
A little while ago, I received an email from a teacher of six and seven year olds in Dublin, Ireland. Her class had seen our blog and wondered lots of things about us. Her email included a list of questions that the students had for my children.
This video is the students’ responses to those questions and includes some of the things that our class wondered as well.
An important skill we are working on this year is telling the beginning, middle and end of a story. Today we read a story about a clever leprechaun and drew pictures of the beginning, middle and end. We used an app called Pic Collage to put the pictures together with the text.
Rebecca Baranowsky, an education student at the University of Regina, has made two videos recently…just for us! The students loved them, so I am sharing them here. Thanks, Rebecca!
First, a story about Harry and Horsie…
And then a video to help us learn to count by 2’s…
This week, we helped out a class in Ohio who wanted to know what what people in other countries ate for lunch. We took pictures of our lunches and tweeted them to Ms Frazier’s class, who then put the pictures into their Voicethread.
We also used Twitter to pretend we were one of the characters in Little Red Riding Hood, and to tweet using that character’s “voice”. What would the wolf, or the huntsman, or the grandma say? Can you tell which character we were in the tweets below?
This week we are learning how to write comments on other kids’ blogs. We’re learning to say kind things, to make connections and to ask questions.
Because we know that they are so important in learning to read, the students have been working hard on their sight words. Just look at how busy they are!
The themes of Remembrance Day and the promises made to the First Nations people were woven together to create this bulletin board.
