A Day in a Kindergarten Classroom
OK. If you follow K Teacher Talk on Facebook, you know that I have been wayyy too geeked out about seeing Jan Richardson today. I have been using Jan’s format in my classroom for the last 3 or 4 years now and I love it! Before Reading her book The Next Step in Guided Reading, my guided reading instruction felt scattered. It has since clicked for me and I will never go back! I love the Jan Plan! You can read my original posts about it here and here. So, on
The whisper phone is a classic teacher DIY. I don’t know who first discovered these babies, but I first learned about them 10 years ago during my undergrad from my favorite reading professor. 8 years into my career, and I’m just getting around to making some of my own. And I’m kicking myself for not doing it sooner! I do have whisper phones in my classroom, which I purchased years ago from a teacher catalog. Almost every single one has broken. They were flimsy, not that cute, and expensive! So
I’m excited to be sharing an easy project with you today–one of my favorite math tools: rekenreks! I don’t know about you, but I love to use rekenreks in my classroom. If you’ve never heard of rekenreks before, you will! These arithmetic racks consist of two strings, with a row of beads on each string. Each row is traditionally made up of five red beads and five white beads, but you can use any two colors you like. They are great for helping students to understand number concepts such as
I’m back for another post about guided reading using Jan Richardson’s book, The Next Step in Guided Reading. Her format really does help you get the most out of that short chunk of guided reading time. Today, I’m going to show you what an emergent reading lesson looks like. This is the format followed for levels A-C. The instructional focus will change depending on students’ needs, but the overall organization and procedures will be the same. Part One-Sight word review We begin the lesson by doing a quick review of
Guided reading used to be a struggle for me. I understood the concepts, read the books on the subject, and implemented guided reading in my classroom, but I just felt like something was missing. It kind of looked like this: “I’m done with the book, Mrs. Brosig!” “OK…um…just read it again! for the 99th time…” Or: “Let’s talk about this eight-sentence book for ‘comprehension’ purposes for a while…like a LONG while!” Or: “Hey! I found these worksheets on Reading A-Z so they must be great!” (not knocking Reading A-Z…I totally
