Sunday, September 20, 2009

Shared Reading

Providing support for the children during shared reading time give the children the greatest sense of success. The teacher's job is to move the children from reading from memory to recognizing letters and their related sounds, recognizing patterns and wording families to recognizing chosen sight words and relaying this to new reading situations.

The emergent readers provided on the sister site http://www.kinderplans.com have been specifically designed to use for the purpose of introducing beginning reading skills in this supportive environment. Below you will find a weekly plan on how you can use one of the readers for the duration of a week.

DAY ONE
  • Relate to student's background experiences - children talk about their own experiences related to the book topic. Example, prior to reading the reader "Jiggle Worms" the students would talk about how they felt the first day of school or trying something new.
  • Predict what the story will be about
  • Teacher reads and students listen. If this is an interactive reader the teacher may have the children predict what will go on the page and he/she demonstrates how to complete the interactive page(s)
  • Teacher reads again, this time he/she tracks, students join in if they are able
  • Students complete an activity related to the text. They may illustrate, color or complete an interactive page related to the story.
DAY TWO
  • Teacher and students reread the text.
  • Students can share a page or other related activity from the previous day.
  • Teacher has text prepared on sentence strips
  • The strips are distributed to the students. The children use the master copy to reconstruct the text in a pocket chart or by lining up the strips on a bulletin board appropriately
  • The teacher practices removing individual lines and students identify what has been removed.
  • Students can complete this similar activity at the literacy center (cut out, rearrange and glue strips in the correct order). The master copy is always available for reference purposes.
YOUNGER STUDENTS: You will likely want to read the story again focusing on tracking each word and demonstrating the left to right movement. Some students may want to use a pointer and try tracking the words and model this to their peers.

DAY THREE - SPECIFIC SKILLS RELATED TO THE TEXT ARE INTRODUCED
  • The children are now familiar with the text and the focus is on more specific skills such as learning the alphabet letter related to the text or sight word.
  • The teacher presents the text with selected words masked (beginning with the focus sound or sight word). The masked words are written on individual word cards. these word cards are distributed to the students.
  • Teacher and students read the text together, stopping to identify each masked word. As the masked word is identified by the students, they search their cards for the appropriate word card.
  • Students are given a copy of the omitted words and complete this at the literacy center. A master copy is available for verification. Students put their copy in a special book and illustrate it. Other sight word activities could be employed. For example, unscramble the focus sight words, play sight word bingo or do a word search where the children locate the focus sight word.
YOUNGER STUDENTS
  • I would focus on the words within the text that use the letter focus sound. Determine words within the text that begin with that sound. Brainstorm for other words that begin with that sound. Act out the sound. For example for the letter "c" pretend to climb saying the sound as you do so.
  • Distribute the alphabet picture cards. The children say the name of the picture and determine if it begins with this sound. Place all the picture cards that begin with that sound under the correct letter corresponding to that sound. These could be used for review purposes frequently. The children could do this independently at the literacy center, sorting picture cards that begin with that sound.

DAY FOUR
  • Particular word patterns are selected from the text. For example, if there is a word within the text that contains the "at" word family this would be the focus of the lesson. Students might have simple spelling lesson printing or identifying words as they think of examples. Some of these words can be put in simple sentences for reading and for sentence dictation.
  • Individual words which have become sight words for any student are written on word cards and students can place these in his/her word bank. Several times each week student take out their word banks to read their words and to engage in activities such as sentence construction using their words.
YOUNGER CHILDREN - Again this would not be appropriate for younger children. I would just focus on hearing rhyming words. This would be in the form of reading books with rhyme (Dr. Seuss) and distributing rhyming picture cards to determine if they rhyme or not.

More shared reading activities can be found at:

Shared Reading in Kindergarten and Preschool

Monday, September 7, 2009

Teaching Printing

Teaching printing to kindergarten can be a challenging task . Introducing letters in the sequence below can assist at making this task less of a problem.
Begin with the letter "c"
"c" turns into
d, a, g, q, o, s, f, e

Next letters would be the down letters like in "l"
"l" turns into
t, i, , k and u

Next letters would be the down, back up and around letters starting with "r"
"r" turns into
n, m, h, b, and p

Next letters would be the slanted letters starting with "v"
"v" turns into
y, w. x and z

The Kinderplans.com alphabet program tries to follow this letter sequence of introducing the letters, however, it does deviate slightly from this because it incorporates sound blending (word families) and themes so following the exact sequence was more challenging. More ideas and a printing book can be found in the link below:

Preschool and Kindergarten Activities for Printing