It’s week 6 of school for us! Week 6 means we are continuing ABC BOOTCAMP, continuing to refine our center routines including adding our ten frames and count the room math centers, continuing our district-mandated requirements, and our foundational skills curriculum. And this week, we’re doing our Family Research Project, using Read It Up for Last Stop On Market Street and introducing subtraction with Five Little Monkeys! 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 continue ABC BOOTCAMP this week and I am so excited to be doing 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 R-U-W-J. (Note: this week we’re doing 4 letters because in my year-long plan I had a letter listed twice…so we’re going to skip Friday and finish up next week according to our calendar!)
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 peacock, bee, ladybug, and elephant!
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 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!
This week is a review week. Sight Word 60 has three weeks of new words and every 4th week is a review week. The review week works like this: we spend the first 3 days of the week reviewing all the words we have learned up until this point. The last 2 days of the week the words are reviewed with games and activities. One of our favorite games is sight word basketball: (The basketball goal hat is from Five Below and can also be found on Amazon!)
Read It Up: Last Stop On Market Street
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, Last Stop On Market Street and use our Read It Up creation! We will do a retell chart, a question and answer chart, detail and evidence chart and a complete sentence chart!
Families Research Project
This year our district pacing required us to start our new curriculum on day 1. Because of this, we missed out on a lot of that necessary “get to know your time” and community building. And you can tell that the atmosphere is different. So, we have 45 minutes each afternoon for PLT/MTSS. I have decided to utilize that time to do the things we’re missing and continue to build that sense of family and community in our classroom. This week we’re continuing our Families Research Project so we can get to know all about our families! We will learn about how our family irritates us, graph how many people are in our family, and do our fingerprints!
We love reading the book My Daddy Snores as part of our Families Research Project!
Math
This week we are introducing subtraction. True story. We introduce subtraction early and continue to work on subtraction all year. This week is a very concrete introduction to subtraction as take away. To make this fun, hands-on, engaging we use monkeys. We are using our Math It Up: Five Little Monkeys resource!
On day 1 we read the story Five Little Monkeys Jumping On The Bed and we act out the story to practice subtraction! And yes, I dress the part! For a video of this lesson, visit the post linked at the end of this post.
On day 2 we are using a five frame to subtract with monkeys! Each child has a set of monkeys (printed and laminated from our Math It Up resource) to solve subtraction problems.
On day 3 we use a giant bed and monkeys to subtract. As we solve the equations, we write the equations and answers on our chart. This introduces equations to our kids but doesn’t require them to write them.
We also do this same activity in small groups using a bed and the same monkeys!
On Friday we will do some bowling to practice subtraction. We found this giant bowling set at Wal-Mart in the summer so it’s perfect for this subtraction lesson. We will use only 5 pins. We will knock down the pins and the students will write answers only on their whiteboards.
Mad Science Thursday
This week for Mad Science Thursday we will be making monkey slime. The slime recipe we use is in our Mad Science Creation! To make monkey slime, we simply add confetti.
Foodie Fun Friday
This week for Foodie Fun Friday we’re making an owl snack using graham crackers, apples, marshmallows, and candy eyes!
For all your back to school/first week needs, check out these resources:
SIGHT WORD READER AND POEM FREEBIE!
For more information, check out these posts:
