It’s week 2 of school for us! We are settling into some routines and procedures! Week 2 means we start ABC BOOTCAMP, introduce centers, continue with Number Bootcamp, our district-mandated requirements, and our foundational skills curriculum. This year, my goal is to show you that you can use our TKS resources along with required curriculums so you’ll see that happening throughout the school year!
District Guidelines
- We are required to wear masks indoors but not at recess.
- We can have shared supplies and centers while maintaining 3 feet of distance when possible.
- We are keeping our enhanced cleaning procedures (wipe down surfaces throughout the day, steam sanitize the room daily, hand sanitizer/hand washing throughout the day, steam mop the floors daily, etc)
Lesson Plans
As always, you can download our weekly lesson plans by clicking on the image!
You can get our EDITABLE lesson plan template by clicking on the image below:
ABC BOOTCAMP
It’s time. We kick off ABC BOOTCAMP this week and I am so excited to do it in-person this year! This year, our district is mandating a foundational skills curriculum. We are completing our district-required skills curriculum and doing ABC BOOTCAMP. We have a 45-minute block for foundational skills. We have found that these lessons are taking about 25-30 minutes. That leaves 15-20 minutes for ABC BOOTCAMP. The circle charts take 10-15 minutes so that will be perfect for that block. Handwriting and hats will be done in our afternoon PLT block which is 45 minutes.
ABC BOOTCAMP is research-based and aligned to best practices. ABC BOOTCAMP is aligned to the science of reading and has been since it was created! After 26 days, we have 80% mastery of all letters and sounds! And it’s fun and developmentally appropriate!
For each sound and letter, we make a circle chart. We introduce the sound first and then we introduce the letter as how we spell the sound. Once we introduce the sound, students generate the words and I draw the picture. YES! YOU HAVE TO DRAW THE PICTURES! It’s more fun than using clipart and it makes for a personal experience that activates the brain’s emotional areas, which improves learning! This year we are following the order of our foundational skills curriculum. This week is M-A-T-D-O!
After we complete the circle charts, we make our famous silly hats. These hats are great for vocabulary and language development and reviewing the sound of the day. Also, making the hats gives us 26 days of dedicated fine motor practice! This week are hats are: ambulance, mustache, tractor, disco ball and an otter!
For all of the details and information on how we do ABC BOOTCAMP, visit the post linked at the end of this blog post!
Sight Word 60!
This week we are also starting Sight Word 60! After spending the summer learning more about the science of reading, we are continuing with Sight Word 60. We have always had decoding and encoding (writing) of the words as part of Sight Word 60 so we will continue that and will increase the amount of decoding and writing. We will also use orthographic mapping and we’re changing our order of sight words to align to the 109 most frequent words (even though we do 100 words…). You can learn all the details of how Sight Word 60 works on the linked blog post and you can get everything you need for Sight Word 60 in our Sight Word 60 creation!
Read It Up: Wild About Books
This year our district has adopted a new curriculum. We are being required to use the curriculum, but we will continue to add in our own fun, creative lesson plans, ideas, and resources. And we will continue to bring the FUN to kindergarten!
We will read the book, Wild About Books and discuss how books help us learn. We will do rhyming words, cite text evidence, complete an I Know/I Can chart, analyze a painting and use colors to show feelings!
Names
This week we will be also working on names! We will be using the book Your Name Is A Song to work on our names!
We are also doing our torn paper names activity this week! This is great for spelling names and tearing paper is great for fine motor skills!
School Supply Research Project
During our first few weeks of school, we use our School Supply Research Project to learn how to use our school supplies. The students generate the rules for the supplies and I record their answers!
To practice with our supplies, we do our supply puzzles. We get plenty of practice with numbers, coloring, cutting, and gluing!
Math
We are continuing with NUMBER BOOTCAMP! We did numbers 1 and 2 last week and my class did an amazing job and they loved Number Bootcamp!
As part of our Number Bootcamp, we learn to explicitly write the numbers!
This week we’re working on counting, one-to-one correspondence, and using ten frames to count. We’re using tasks from our district and adding our own spin and fun to them. I’m excited to try some new activities while also using some of our favorite games and lessons!
For our ten frames lesson, we’re going to play our giant ten frame on the carpet! We make our ten frame using strips and numbers from SitSpots! I HIGHLY recommend SitSpots (and only purchase from their website NOT FROM AMAZON!) Students toss a bean bag, we identify the number, and build the ten frame!
Our remaining activities:
- Muffin Pan Counting-we are making a giant “muffin pan” from construction paper. Students will toss a “muffin” and idntify the number. We will count the correct number of objects onto our plate.
- Counting Shapes-read the book 123 To The Zoo. Students will get a pile of shapes. They will sort the shapes and then count how many of each shapes.
- Counting Caterpillar-read The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Students will get a book with a page for each number and will put the correct number of stickers on their book. (The book will be from our Number Bootcamp!)
Foodie Fun Friday
This week our Foodie Fun Friday is Friendship Salad! This is always a favorite!
For all your back to school/first week needs, check out these resources:
SIGHT WORD READER FREEBIE!
For more information, check out these posts:
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2 comments
II would love to see a training on your focus wall! I’m super intrigued with all the 411 about it.
I am so grateful to you for sharing your ideas and work with everyone. I am taking part in Elevate this summer and it is absolutely amazing! I have a question about Read It Up and Wit and Wisdom….how do you find the time to do both? My school uses Expeditionary Learning as it’s reading and writing program and it takes most of the morning to complete but I would love to incorporate some of the Read It Up books and activities. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!