Happy New Year!

Happy New Year everyone!  I have been so inspired by other teachers blogs that I decided to create my own!  I also used to have a pretty nice (at least I thought so) website through my school district and they changed everything, so I wanted a space to share information with parents and other teachers again.

We use Harcourt Brace Treasures for our reading program and when we get back to school we will be reading: "Does a Kangaroo Have a Mother Too?" by Eric Carle.  This gives me a good excuse to torment the other awesome fellow kindergarten teacher in the building as I think this is her least favorite story that we read during the school year.  I honestly think it would be better to read it earlier in the year as it is a pattern story, but alas, I am not a reading series publisher and do not make these decisions. :)

I want to assess rhyming this week. For some reason there is like four pages of rhyming on the GATES test in the spring.  So I need to get a handle on who cannot rhyme and start targeting it.  I made a simple rhyming game with a kangaroo theme to go with the story.  I am going to ask my parapro to make some notations of who cannot rhyme as they use this in a small group.

Download Kangaroo Rhyming Game Here

Hopefully this works as this is the first time I have used Google Docs.an

I also made a beginning letter match featuring animals from the story.  This will be used in a small group with my para pro targeting the kids who were not benchmark on initial sound fluency on DIBELS in the fall.  We have another round of DIBELS coming up and it is time to review.  Hopefully, it will also help impact vocabulary and naming  animals in the story.

Download Beginning Sound Match Here

The other story we will be reading this week is "Are You There Baby Bear?"

 This story does not seem to be as controversial to fellow awesome kindergarten teacher :)

Also on the agenda is "The Three Billy Goats Gruff".

Not sure which version we will be reading as I will have to check and see what we have in the school library.  Our awesome librarian ordered a bunch of books for me last year as I don't like reading stories out of the anthology the textbook series provides.

Do you detect an animal theme?  Actually, some of my students really need to work on baby and adult animal names...I mentioned this to my reading para pro who is also our afternoon wrap teacher.   Vocabulary is a big deal to me.  I have read that children in poverty come to school with thousands less words than middle class children.  So hopefully we can work on this at some point this week.

Well that's all for now.  I will (hopefully) be adding lots of stuff this week when I get back to school and can add pictures.