First Week of Kindergarten Ideas

The first week of Kindergarten is exciting but it can also be very tiring! I've been asked many times for some ideas on what to do during the first week to get students settled and into the routine of school. Here are some of my favourite things to do during that first week (or even couple of weeks).

Stories

Read lots and lots of books! Use it as a way to settle students in the morning, after break and just before hometime. Students love hearing stories and as numerous studies have shown, exposure to literature is vital for students' literacy and language development. 

I also like to use stories as a way of teaching students how to listen to and engage with a book. I know this might seem obvious and that students should already come to school knowing how to listen, but it's important that we set up our expectations on what listening to a story looks like. I like to do this in a simple manner by telling students that when I read a story, I have a job and they have a job too. My job is to read the story and the students' job is to listen. I then read the story with no additional commentary and any hand raises or interruptions are stopped. BUT WAIT?! What about the questioning and discussion? That all comes later once the listening and engagement has been taught explicitly.

Nursery Rhymes

Nursery Rhymes are another great way to start literacy in the classroom. They help students develop their ability to hear rhyme, syllables and sounds. I like to do a variety of activities which come in my Nursery Rhyme packs. These activities include sequencing, listening for rhyming words, looking for letters and making mini books. YouTube is a great source for video versions of the Rhyme.

Lining Up Game

The Lining Up Game is a fun way to teach students how to line up in two lines after break times. I take my students out to our lining up area to play this to make it as authentic as possible. How does it work? I get the kids to start by sitting in two perfect lines and explain that this is how they need to be sitting at the end of each break. For the game they just need to know two commands "play" and "bell's gone!". Play means they run around as if it's break time. "Bell's gone!" means they need to find a partner and make two lines. We play this over and over again until they consistently make two, straight lines with no pushing in/dramas. Positive feedback is a must and the more cheesy the better! e.g "YOU are the CHAMPIONS of lining up!", "You're going to make all the other teachers jealous!". Play this before each break for two days and you WILL have the best class at making two lines!

Number Crafts

I love doing craft activities, even during the first week of school! It's a great way to build a sense of fun and get students to start developing all the important fine motor skills they will need for the rest of the school year. These Number Crafts focus on numbers and colours. They're super cute and are perfect for decorating your classroom during the first few weeks.

Name Activities

Not every student in your class will come to school knowing how to write, spell or recognise their name so it's important to get ontop of that during the first term. I have name activities as part of rotations and students work on their names every day. I have two hands-on activities which can be found here and here. I also use magnetic letters and cut and paste activities. Changing it up keeps it interesting and engaging for students.

Pre-Number Skills

Pre-Number skills are essential in building the foundations for a deep understanding of numbers and how they work. I start off with Pre-Number activities from day one by incorporating these into rotations. Pre-Number skills include sorting, matching, ordering and comparing. I use a range of resources from math manipulatives in the classroom to games and activities that I've cut and laminated. 

Sorting games, more or less? and matching can be found by clicking on their names.

Rules and Expectations

Explicit teaching of rules and expectations is a must. Get these sorted in the first few weeks and your year will run smoothly. I have an in-depth post about that which you can read here.

Developmental Play

During the first week, the afternoon sessions are dedicated to Developmental Play. This is a great way for students to make friends with their classmates and to relax - remember they're probably just as tired as you! A new scene, routine, and people can be quite exhausting for the little ones. Play allows for social skills to be tested and developed while using imagination. I like to have unstructured play during the first week, so I can sit back and watch students interact with each other while making notes on what social skills need to be explicitly taught and which students might need some extra support socially.

These ideas will keep you going for the first week and help students settle into the routine of school. I hope you have found these ideas inspiring and have helped you plan for your first week of Kindergarten. Keep up with my teaching adventures by following my Social Media accounts: Facebook and Instagram.

Casual Teaching on Year 1: Rhyming Words, Summarising and 2D Shapes

Today I was on the same Year 1 class as last week. Once again I had a pretty great day with them :)

Here are some of the things we go up to...

Rhyming Words
We reviewed the concept. Students were able to tell me that they are words that sound the same AND have the same sound/letters at the end of the word.

We did a choral read of Hop on Pop by Dr. Seuss. This book just lead perfectly into it as it states the rhyming words before putting them into sentences.

After that I gave students a word and they had to brainstorm as many words as possible that rhymed with the word.

To end the lesson we played a whole class game; rhyming word dominoes. The dominoes joined by finding the pictures that rhymed.

Summarising
I introduced the concept of summarising by explaining that we take the most important ideas and say them in our own words. I related this to giving news, how we don't give EVERY single detail.

The text I was was Giraffes Can't Dance.

After reading the text I introduced the 'Somebody, Wanted, But, So, Then' strategy using my retelling pack, which you can find over here.

As a class we went through each step;

Somebody? Who was the main character? Gerald.
Wanted? What did he want? To dance.
But? What was the problem? He couldn't.
So? What did he do to fix the problem? He practised.
Then? What happened at the end? He was able to dance at the Jungle Dance.

Then students filled out this graphic organiser, which is from my Super 6 Activity Pack on TPT. You can check it out by clicking here.

Students could either draw or write in the boxes.

2D Shapes
To start this lesson off, students brainstormed a list of all the 2D shapes they could think of. I was pretty impressed that they already knew of nonagons and decagons. We then played a game where students had to find things in the classroom that were a given shape.

After that, students made a shape pizza. In the morning I had cut out a whole heap of shapes from coloured paper. Students had to grab a handful of shapes from the bag, arrange them on their pizza and then count how many of each shape to complete statements about their pizza.

Tomorrow is the last day of term 2 and then we have a 2 week holiday. My goal for the holiday is to go through all my teaching resources and sort them out a bit better. At the moment I have bits and pieces all over the place.

Enjoy the rest of your week! :)

Casual Teaching on Year 1: Visualising, Mass, Rhyming and Craft!

Today was my first day teaching in 13 months!

I was excited to come back. As much as I loved travelling, I still missed being in the classroom.

I was given a Year 1 class, which I was happy about. I prefer teaching K-3 and feel more comfortable with that grade range as that's where I've had the most experience.

Seeing everyone again was nice. Lots of hugs and 'Welcome Back' moments :)

So what did we do today?

After the morning routine was taken care of, we did a lesson on one of the Super Six Comprehension Strategies; Visualising.

I started if off with a revision of the concept and read a passage from The Gruffalo's Child.

The passage described the Big Bad Mouse character. Students then drew and coloured their visualisations. Students were encouraged to label their drawing e.g. "long, strong tail" and "fiery eyes".

Students then shared their drawings with the class and I showed them what the mouse looked like in the story. If you're not familiar with the text, the Big Bad Mouse looks like a normal mouse. This was a great discussion point - Why was the mouse described as being big and scary when he was just a regular mouse?

At that point we had to pack up and go to the library, so I left them with that question and we would go back to it later.

Library was fun, I got to read a story to the two classes.

I had duty first half of lunch. They added a new duty area and I had no idea where it was. Awkward! I had a whole heap of students follow me around asking me where I had been and if it was really me, haha. I never thought that so many students would have noticed I wasn't around.

After lunch, I read The Gruffalo's Child. The students picked up that the Gruffalo couldn't remember exactly what the mouse looked like so he made it up.

We then moved onto maths. I brought in my own equal arm balance. A great purchase for only $5 a few years ago. We talked about what it is used for and how to read it. Then we had some fun by estimating how many 10's rods would be needed to equalise the balance with various classroom objects. Very important to make sure the students were counting each rod as they placed it in rather than just counting randomly.

There was only about half an hour till recess so we had a mini lesson on rhyming words. After discussing what rhyming words are, I read There's a Wocket in my Pocket by Dr. Seuss.

Dr. Seuss books are great for rhyming words. The students loved the story as well as picking out the rhyming words on each page.

After the story, we played a game. I picked a base word and then called out words that rhymed with the word. As long as the words rhymed with my base word, the students could move around the room. When I called out a word that did not rhyme, students had to freeze. Great way to get the wiggles out!

After recess, we did a craft activity. Students could make either a lion or a butterfly.

It was a great first day back and the day just flew by. Looking forward to more days :) I would love to post photos of the work, but to keep it simple and avoid any sort of legal drama, I'm refraining from posting. It's just not worth the potential trouble.