Categories ABC Bootcamp Component, Literacy, Math, Weekly Lesson Plans

SCHEDULIN SUNDAY: ABC BOOTCAMP, GERMS, NAMES AND COUNTING

Week 2 of kindergarten is about names, kicking off ABC BOOTCAMP, continuing Number Bootcamp, learning about germs and staying healthy, and more! And lots more work on routines and procedures and introducing centers!

Lesson Plans

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You can get our lesson plan templates here:

ABC BOOTCAMP

We have a required foundational skills curriculum that we follow and we supplement it with our TKS BOOTCAMP resource. Our TKS BOOTCAMP curriculum works with ALL curriculums or as a stand-alone resource! This week we’re excited to kick off ABC BOOTCAMP! Not only are we focused on learning sounds and letters but we’re also getting fine motor practice, working on handwriting, and establishing routines!

ABC BOOTCAMP has always been aligned with the science of reading and has been used in classrooms for 10 years! We focus on a sound/letter a day. Students can bring in objects for the sound to help us make our circle chart. Students share a word, we identify the sound, and I draw the picture. This is key. Drawing the picture is much more effective than using printed pictures because it activates the emotional parts of the brain for kids. DRAW THE PICTURES!

This week is: M, A, T, D, O.

We’re going in the order of our foundational skills curriculum. ABC BOOTCAMP works in any order!

For each letter, we also do explicit handwriting instruction and work on letter formation.

And, maybe, my favorite part of ABC BOOTCAMP is the hats. They’re fun, they’re great for building vocabulary, and they give us daily fine motor practice for 26 days!

This week’s hats: mustache, ambulance, disco ball, tractor, and otter!

ABC BOOTCAMP is classroom proven and highly effective with 80% mastery of sounds and letters in 26 days. ABC BOOTCAMP is all-inclusive and has everything you need to bring this resource into your classroom!

Names

This week we’re going to be working on names! We’re going to write names, graph our names and how many letters are in our names, and make torn paper names!

We will begin my reading the book Your Name Is A Song which is a beautiful book about the importance of names and pronouncing names correctly!

We also make torn paper names! We use 12×18 black construction paper. I write the names with white crayon and model how to tear the paper and glue the pieces onto the paper. These are then put on the board and stay up all year! This is another great fine motor activity and it takes a long time so you can get some assessment done!

Reading

Once again this year we’re using our required reading curriculum and supplementing heavily with our Read It Up! resources. This week we’re finishing up Wild About Books and reading Spookley The Square Pumpkin The First Day Of School. We use the Spookley book to compare our classroom to the book and have a conversation about taking care of the classroom, keeping it clean, and being responsible for the classroom!

Also, we just love Spookley and will always use his books in our classroom. We got to meet Spookley and the author at ELEVATE! New England and it was so fun!

Math

Our district has adopted a new math curriculum (AGAIN!) so we’re trying to figure it out because it’s a lot and it’s not aligned to our state standards so there’s that. We’re using the curriculum and supplementing it with our MATH IT UP! resources and Number Bootcamp!

Number Bootcamp is 20 days of number recognition, one-to-one correspondence, and math vocabulary!

We did 1 and 2 last week and the kids did a great job! This week is #3-7.

Number Bootcamp was updated this summer so it’s aligned to the latest science of math research and the fonts and design have been updated! This is what it looks like now:

This week our focus is counting. We’re going to counting bags, counting collections and gumball counting!

Counting bags is simply putting some objects in bags and counting them. I will probably use snap cubes in all the bags and do bags for 5-10. We will do them whole group and then I’ll have the kids to them in pairs.

The next day we will do the same thing but we will add in our counting collections recording page. Students will count, write and draw how many.

We are also doing a new activity this week. We’re taking the lesson from our curriculum and making it better! We’re going to make a giant gumball machine using poster board. We will say a number and the kids will count the gumballs into the gumball machine! Stay tuned for the pics and videos of this lesson!

Germs

This week we’re using our science block (ya’ll! My new school has a legit 45-minute science/social studies block!!!) to learn about germs and staying healthy. This has been a staple of our classroom since Covid. It’s such an important topic at the beginning of the year and I think this research project helps keep us a little more healthy!

We use read-alouds and videos for our research. We record our learning on graphic organizers. We will learn about germs using a can/have/are chart. Then we discuss good and bad choices for staying healthy and finally, we learn how to wash our hands.

After we learn to wash our hands, we practice to see if we do a good job. For this activity, we use Glo-Germ soap and a blacklight. The soap glows on our hands so we can see if we wash away the germs! The links to the soap and the details for this experiment are included in the research project.