Categories Classroom Management, S.T.E.A.M., Social Studies, Weekly Lesson Plans

Schedulin Sunday: Families, Five Senses, And ABC BOOTCAMP

Week 3 of kindergarten is about ABC BOOTCAMP, continuing Number Bootcamp, and learning about our five senses and families. And lots more work on routines and procedures and introducing centers!

Lesson Plans

As always, you can download our weekly lesson plans by clicking on the image!

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 continuing 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: C, G, N, I, H

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

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: castle, grapes, noodles, iguana and hamburger

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

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!

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 kicking off our Five Senses Research Project which is the first unit of our curriculum.

This week we use the book My Five Senses.

We will do a notice and wonder chart and make a list of our five senses and what we experience with those senses.

And of course, no five senses unit is complete without Potato Head!

Yes, there is a costume. The costume is from Amazon! Click the image to see the costume on Amazon!

We also make a Potato Head! As with all of our art projects, these are kid created. I model each step and then the kids do it! No templates are used.

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!

This week is #8-12

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 on sorting and counting. Basically all week we’re sorting objects and discussing how we sorted them. We will sort and count. We’re also creating a new MAth It Up! resource for sorting. So stay tuned!

We will also introduce math centers this week!

Families Research Project

This week we’re using our social studies block (ya’ll! My new school has a legit 45-minute science/social studies block!!!) to learn about our families. This unit is a MUST in all classrooms so we get to know our students and families and create a safe, inclusive, and welcoming space for ALL students and ALL families.

We use read-alouds and class discussions for our research. We record our learning on graphic organizers. We will learn about families using a can/have/are chart. We discuss who is in our families and focus on how families can be the same and different.

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.

The kids also draw their families in their Families Research Journal which is included in our research project.

We also read And Tango Makes Three to discuss how families are different but all families are love. This book is very special to our family because I used this book to share the news of Adelynn’s adoption with my class more than 4 years ago! We also create our first story map!

As part of our research project, we also do self-portraits. This is another student-centered art project. I model each step and the kids do it. The kids also choose their skin color and shirt color.