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

Schedulin’ Sunday: Last Stop On Market Street, ABC BOOTCAMP And Apples

Week 6 of kindergarten is about ABC BOOTCAMP, wrapping up Number Bootcamp, learning about apples, and reading Last Stop On Market Street. We’re also expecting 12-15 visitors from the central office and it’s a four-day week for us because of a local election this week!

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: R, U, W, J

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: rainbow, woodpecker, underwear, and Jeep!

We also do explicit handwriting instruction for each letter 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!

UPDATE: As of September 8, we are halfway through ABC BOOTCAMP, so I used ESGI (use code SMORGIE to get a free trial!) to do our mid-Bootcamp assessments. We have grown from 10% mastery of letters and sounds to 25%, and we’re only halfway through so I couldn’t be more proud of my class and this curriculum.

ABC BOOTCAMP is all-inclusive and includes tools for small groups. We will focus on the sound/letter we’re learning each day.

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 using Last Stop On Market Street and how we use our senses to explore the world around us.

This week we’re focusing on what we notice, generating questions, retelling, and adding details to our drawings.

This activity is a great example of how we use our required curriculum but make it more meaningful and fun. The curriculum calls for us to draw a bus and add some windows as details. OK. That’s not very much detail to add and doesn’t really seem to get the point across. So what we do is a directed drawing of a boy. Then, we discuss who it is. Since we don’t have any details it could be anyone. When we add some details, we realize we drew CJ (from the story), and we see how important details are in helping us understand what we read! See how we took the curriculum and made it more fun and meaningful? This is also a great lesson on how to draw people so we don’t get stick people all the time!

The big focus of these lessons is the kids generating questions about the story. To help this go a little smoother, we use our wonder wheel. This helps students by giving them the scaffolding and words to ask questions.

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 with 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 #17-20!

Number Bootcamp was updated this summer, so it’s aligned with 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 counting. The curriculum calls for students to count objects from bags onto ten frames. We will use our Math It Up! resource to supplement this. We also have two days of assessment on this unit.

Apples Research Project

This week we’re using our science block (ya’ll! My new school has a legit 45-minute science/social studies block!!!) to kick off our apple unit!

We use read-alouds and class discussions for our research. We record our learning on graphic organizers. This week we kick off our Apple Research Project with a schema map! This helps us know what the kids know and builds background knowledge! Students share their schema about apples, and we write down what they say (everything they say is included and is addressed as we progress through our unit!) using sticky notes. As we work through our research project, we add new learning and revisit our schema to address any misconceptions!

This week we will complete a can/have/are chat and label the parts of an apple!

Students use their Apple Research Project to record their learning throughout the research project!

We will also paint some apples using paper plates!

Make sure to grab our all-inclusive, science of reading-aligned Apples Research Project to make planning and prepping for your apple unit easier!

Foodie Fun Friday

This week for Foodie Fun Friday we’re making apple pie in a cup!

American Symbols/Community Helpers

This week is the anniversary of 9/11, so we know many people spend time on American Symbols and community helpers, so we want to share our resources for those as well. (And Constitution Day is September 17th!)