Monday Phonics Fun

I love Monday afternoons in my kindergarten class! I hate Monday mornings because I'm usually sleepy, unprepared, and cranky! But Monday afternoons are some of my favorite time with my super kinders.

On Mondays we have early release for PLCs and get out at 1:35, but the PM kinders still come at 11:45 like usual. The other days are longer to make up for the missed time, but Monday afternoons are deliciously short. This means we don't have time for ELD or centers, so we it's the one day of the week where we get to do things we don't normally do, like smart board games, art, and science. Today I let the kids have free choice for longer than normal (probably longer than I should have!), then we worked on phonics.

All last week we were going through Lidia Barbosa's "Letter S and Syllables" packet that the kids have printed and bound in their blue center folders. They totally love her engaging and rigorous activities! Today I printed out the Level B reader she has in the packet 4-up (four on a page) to make mini-books. It was a color book, so we read it together on the board, which they did amazingly! I'm so impressed by how well my top girls are reading, even though we haven't done nearly enough practice with this this year! They know their sight words, and were chunking the other words into syllables. =)

After we finished, we noticed that the book didn't make sense. The pattern was, "La sirena es verde." But everything was actually white! So then we got out colored pencils (brand new ones!) and I passed out the student versions on clip boards. They sat at the carpet and colored their books according to the words while I colored mine on the doc cam. I heard so many great bucket-filling phrases like, "Wow, I like how you're coloring," and "You're not getting out of the lines at all!" What great friends! =)

Tomorrow, we are going to think of a few more things that start with S, and then each child has a blank page to fill in and write their own sentence on. After that, we'll cut apart our pages, stack them up, and staple them! My hope is that each child will be able to at least "magic memory" read their book so I can send them home tomorrow. For the other letter books, I'm sending them to the Print Shop to run on their booklet maker so they aren't quite so work intensive for us in class!