Categories Literacy, Math, S.T.E.A.M., Weekly Lesson Plans

Schedulin’ Sunday: Magic Potion, Five Senses, Numbers Bootcamp, And ABC BOOTCAMP

Week 4 of kindergarten is about ABC BOOTCAMP, continuing Number Bootcamp, and learning about our five senses and families. It’s also the week we kick off our Mad Science Thursdays. And this week is a short week because Friday is a PD day!

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: S, F, V, Z

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: sock, fire, vampire, and zipper. In previous years, we’ve done starfish, frog, vampire and zombies)

(The sock and fire hats are new additions to the hats. Here’s the deal: we’re in the classroom and we’re always researching and learning so our resources are always being revised and improved!)

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!

This week we’re also going to start some more formal small groups. We will focus on the sound/letter we’re learning each day. We’re using the small group tools included in ABC BOOTCAMP!

Also this week in our small groups, we’re going to introduce our Game It Up! games for letters and sounds!

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 by Aliki.

We will do a notice and wonder chart for the book with a focus on our wondering or questions about the story. To help with generating questions, we use a wonder wheel and LOTS of modeling, scaffolding, and practice! We will also work on the main idea/details of the story. This is a very basic introduction to this skill. Through discussion I get the gets to tell me the book is about the five senses (main idea) and the details are what we do with those five senses (examples from the book).

We are also going to work on our sensory jars. Basically, we identity things that can be smelled/touched/tasted AND what they might taste/smell/feel like.

This is an example of the taste jar. This week we will do smell and taste.

Here’s another example of a smell chart:

After we do the charts, students draw things can smell/taste.

To wrap up our five senses learning for this week we are going to use our five senses to describe POPCORN! We will read The Popcorn Book by Tomie DePaola and use an air popper to make popcorn. Ya’ll. Get the air popper and use it with the kids. IT IS MIND BLOWING TO THEM!

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 #11-14

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!

I’m excited because one of our sorting activities is sorting pancakes, waffles, and donuts. The curriculum had some black-and-white images and a basic activity. Nope. We made giant color images of the foods. And we’re sorting them onto plates. It’s gonna be so much fun! Videos coming 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. This week we will graph how many people are in our families (people who live in our house) and how our families irritate us.

The “how my family irritates me” is always funny. I make sure to send this picture to the families to see if they can figure out who said what! For this book, we read the book My Daddy Snores!

Mad Science Thursday

This week we’re kicking off our Mad Science Thursdays! Each week we do a hands-on science experiment. For these experiments we use our Student Scientists resource and the kids do 99% of the experiment!

This week is our magic potion experiment!

This also means it’s time for our mad scientist to make his first appearance!

ART PROJECTS

This week we have two art projects related to families/five senses. First, we’re doing handprints because it can work for our families project and it can work for five senses! Both of these projects are done one-on-one as the kids work in centers!