It’s week 8 of school for us! Week 8 means we are wrapping up ABC BOOTCAMP, continuing our district-mandated requirements, and our foundational skills curriculum. And this week, we’re finishing our Apples Research Project, doing Shapes Bootcamp. AND IT’S CHICKA CHICKA BOOM BOOM WEEK! FINALLY! 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
We are wrapping up ABC BOOTCAMP this week! 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 X,Y and Q.
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 our hats are x-ray, question mark and yoga.
For all of the details and information on how we do ABC BOOTCAMP, visit the post linked at the end of this blog post!
And since we’re wrapping up ABC BOOTCAMP, we will spend time reviewing our letters and sounds! This week we’re going on a letter hunt! We will read Shiver Me Letters and students will hunt for letters in magazines. They will identify the letter and sound to me and sort the letter onto our chart!
Sight Word 60!
This week we are continuing 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: Chicka Chicka Boom Boom
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!
This week is FINALLY Chicka Chicka Boom Boom week! This is actually a required text in our curriculum and it comes later than normal but we’re going all-in on Chicka Chicka week!!! And let me just say, we are SO PUMPED for this week!
We kick off Chicka Chicka week with a letter hunt! We’ve done this in a variety of ways over the years, but this year we’re using our giant Alpha-Pals letters! I am so excited to break these out in our classroom. We used them numerous times for virtual learning last year and they were AMAZING! I know they will be amazing in person too! And we even have a set at home for Adelynn Rose and she loves them too! Ya’ll need these in your classroom!
One of the key pieces of the week is our repeated language chart! We do this daily to build fluency and practice letters, sounds, and names! We read this chart over and over again. As we read, I change the sticky notes so we can work on name recognition and letters!
We will do a directed drawing of a coconut tree and letters!
We will do a letters/numbers/words sort!
Also, as part of our curriculum, we will complete a wonder chart where students generate questions about the book, a chart about who the characters are and what they are doing, and what we see and hear in the story.
Apples Research Project
This week, we are wrapping up our Apple Research Project!
We start with our apple schema map!
This week we are learning the life cycle of an apple, doing a true false sort about apples, and building an apple tower and we will complete our schema map by adding in new learning and addressing misconceptions!
Math
This week we are using Shapes Bootcamp to learn about 2D shapes!
Each day we will do a graphic organizer for each shape!
We will go on a shape hunt using magazines! Students find pictures of shapes, cut out the shapes and they bring the shape to me. They identify the shape, the number of sides, and vertices. Then they glue the shape onto the correct chart.
The next day the students do a shape sort as an assessment piece!
Mad Science Thursday
This week for Mad Science Thursday we will be using our five senses to describe apples and coconuts and we will do an experiment to see if apples and coconuts sink or float!
Foodie Fun Friday
This week for Foodie Fun Friday we’re having a shape party! We bring in various snacks in all different shapes. We identify the shapes and their attributes and sort the shapes! And then we eat all the snacks! We have done this activity a variety of ways: you can do it with 2D shapes only or you can do 3D shapes if you’ve learned them. You can provide the snacks or have the kids bring in snacks. Having the kids bring the snacks is a more interesting experience to see what snacks and shapes you get!
These are the resources we are using in our classroom this week:
SIGHT WORD READER AND POEM FREEBIE!
For more information, check out these posts:
Thank You To Rush Order Tees!
We’ve been on the hunt for some new swag and decided to check out Rush Order Tees. They sent us this sweatshirt and polo to see what we think. Thank you Rush Order Tees! If you’re interested in some shirts for yourself, your students, maybe a team, check them out at https://www.rushordertees.com/no-minimum.
