Fun activities we have been doing in our guided reading groups
are SenTeNce ScRamBles. I got this idea
from our amazing reading specialists.
Students read over different kinds of text and then are given words in a
sentence out of order. Students use clues
to unscramble the sentence. (Students
know that a sentence must start with a capital letter so they first look for
that word that starts as well as the word that has punctuation at the end.) Then they think about what the happened in
the story and piece the sentence together so that the structure of the sentence
makes sense and it has meaning. Once the
students unscramble the sentence, they then search through the text to find
where that exact sentence is. This
works on students’ comprehension as well as be able to remember the sequence of
the story which is a key component in the Kindergarten curriculum. We want students to master telling what
happened at the beginning, middle and end of a text. The students love trying to find where the
sentence is. They really pay attention
to the clues in the sentence and then look accordingly in the correction
section of the text.
We FINALLY finished MAP testing this week! I am so proud of all of the students. They really did try their best, these are very long tests to sit through for a Kindergartener.
Watch the video of me sharing a “Mrs. Kressin is a cat lady math scenario”. I want the students to first be able to recognize whether my verbal problem is subtraction or addition and explain how they knew that. The students are quickly able to identify that something is “taken away”, so it is subtraction.
I also asked the same group to review greater than, less than and equal to. To make it more difficult, I used numbers that we can get confused.15 and 51, 14 and 41, 13 and 31, 12 and 21, etc. Students at this age, can quickly look at the number 21 and think it is 12. When students are done placing the correct symbol in the expression, I have them "read" it to me. (i.e. "41 is greater than 14." At first the student had made a mistake on this one, but when she was reading " 41 is equal to 14" aloud...she said.."oops! This one is greater than.." and corrected herself without me saying a word!)
The next few weeks of school are going to be so busy!I can’t believe the year is coming to a close already! This has been such a fantastic group of students, I am going to miss them so much!
