SDE Kindergarten Conference Recap

I am so excited to be presenting today at the Franklin SDE conference because these are my stomping grounds! Every time I speak at a conference, I try to recap what was discussed and throw a sale in my TpT store.

Critical Thinking

I hope that you are able to walk away with some tangible ideas from our session today!

One of the projects that was fun for me to do with my students was this Button Stem Activity, and it was so easy to do. The kids loved it!

The plan is to make some of these question stem rings, but if you weren’t able to make on today or you wanted to share with a teacher friend, here is where you can download it! I told you all about a fun lesson that I do with my kids to teach inferring!

Some of my favorite units to use with digging deeper with reading are Fairy Tales and Fractured Fairy Tales.

We talked about the 8 comprehension strategies to use during guided reading groups.

This is an awesome anchor chart for determining importance from the wildrumpusblog.com

An anchor chart that I made to help students determine the difference between thick and thin questions can be found here.

For reading groups, a way that I help students with “fix up” strategies is with the helping hand.

Beyond the Worksheets

The idea for this session began when I wanted to try a day with my kids to toss out the worksheets for a day. . You can read all about that in my work-sheet free Wednesday post.

This session is jam packed but here are the units I referenced throughout the session.

Here is the blog post for Vowel Surgery if you weren’t in the session and would like to learn more about it.

I also talked about the day we did Punctuation Police.

Again, there is a blog post with more details or if you forgot something I said, reference this post! It will help 🙂

A fun game we play at the beginning of the year is ABC football. Here is the post and unit.

Word Wall Wizard is such a fun sight word game to play. Once the kids get the hang of it, you might even find them playing it on their own by the word wall!

I also have a fun math game called “Minus Mustache” and an Eric Carle craft re-tell activity that my kids always love doing in place of work-sheets.

Something that we do in my class is oral presentations. We do it once a month and the students work on speaking and listening while staying on topic 🙂

Squeezin’ in Science and Social Studies

Again, so much content! If you are like me, science and social studies is HARD to fit in…or you have to do one or the other. It’s difficult to do both every single day. One way to embed both subjects is to weave it in through literacy and math throughout the day if you don’t have time to get to it.

There are so many wonderful books out there that you can get your hands on that cover so many science and social study standards. We talked about some different activities today.

We chatted about a tree walk that we go on and here is a freebie that you can grab and do it with your kiddos.

We talked about going on a solid walk, a sinking and floating activity for states of matter. Here is my blog post that covers a lot of it and a fun freebie.

Another standard we addressed is weather and calendar. I have found that this is the easiest way to address weather every day. We do it as part of our calendar time. The skills build on each month. It has saved me so much time and paper!

Another way I like to implement weather is through a weather week and I use this weather unit. We try to tie in as much literacy and math that we possibly can!

Here is the link to the candy experiment with the free download.

Some of the Social Study units are Community Helpers, Family, Traditions, maps and globes and famous Americans.

Here are some of the units and freebies.

This American Symbols book is so perfect to use when you are teaching about President’s Day.

We talked about ways you can implement vocabulary throughout your day because trying to squeeze in both science and social studies every day can be challenging!

Try to incorporate as much as you can throughout your day without having to take 30-45 minutes of your already shortened day to teach about President’s Day or to do a lesson on family.

Another way to cover some of these standards is to have kiddos do presentations on these topics. I have students do a presentation on their family at the beginning of the year and one of our standards is famous Tennesseans…so we do a presentation on that in February. What better way for kids to learn?!? They teach each other!

Chants and Cheers: Let’s Go Kindergarteners!

Woohoo!!!! So many ways to get kids up and moving and cheering for each other and to help them remember standards. Here are some of the cheers and chants we are covering in this session (but not all of them 🙂

These are some of my content cheers.

My amazing friend, Amy Lemons, has some great cheers as well!

Even if you can’t use the content of these cheers, it will help get your creative juices flowing to give you ideas for your own classroom chants and cheers!

These free sight word chants from Cara Caroll are fabulous!