Classroom Update and a freebie

This is going to be a quick post. I have to go to physical therapy in 30 minutes. I'm no longer required to go to therapy for my knee but I'm trying to keep my knee strong. Also, I might be a weirdo because I really like going to PT. It makes me feel better and I love my therapist! They are seriously the best. I've been going for 8 months so they are my friends too. Anyway, I went to my classroom for the first time yesterday. I was a little scared as to what I was going to be walking into because we had new floors installed. Our principal made it sound like our things could be damaged in the process. But overall it wasn't too bad. I took some before and after pictures to share with you.

 I couldn't move the heavy stuff so while waiting for the custodians to come help me I worked on bulletin boards. You know. They are important. Last year my colors were black, red, and blue. I loved my room last year. But it wasn't very kindergarten. (Which was the idea because I was in first grade) This year I'm doing some brighter colors. So I changed out the fabric and borders.

This board still needs a little work. It's going to have pictures of the kids' and their families on it. I was inspired by Jeannie over at Kindergarten Lifestyle (Check her post out here. She has a freebie.) Here are a couple more pictures of the work I got done yesterday. I was pretty pleased with it. It looks more like a classroom now.

I needed a new rug and I really didn't want to have to spend a ton of money on it. (Well, Chris wasn't crazy about me spending $80 or more) So I found this one at Big lots for $16. I'm thinking I'm going to write a PTA grant for a nice rug sometime this year.
One last thing before I go, I had a reader ask me to share the guided reading slides I had made for my posts about The Next Step in Guided Reading by Jan Richardson.

Click here to get the slides in a pdf. 

I plan on printing these out and putting them in my guided reading notebook as a reminder of what I  read and learned from this study. If you download it, I would love to hear from you. 

The Next Step in Guided Reading Chapter 4

I'm joining the ladies over at Freeblicious for the next installment of the book study for The Next Step in Guided Reading: Focused Assessments and Targeted Lessons for Helping Every Student Become a Better Reader. (Seriously if you haven't gotten this book yet, You need to. It's awesome)

This chapter is all about Early guided reading. This group is mostly what first grade is all about. But it can also include your higher kinders and lower second graders. I'm really wishing I had read this book last year when I was floundering around with my guided reading groups.
This quote is one that really stuck in my mind while reading this chapter.

Asking students if things make sense is so important for them to be able to comprehend the story. I'm thinking I might print this slide out and put it in my guided reading notebook. (In fact I'll probably print all these slides out for that purpose.)

Here's the gist of what you do during a two day lesson that last about 20 minutes each day. 

The first day:

Day 2 begins much like day 1 with sight word review, reading and prompting and teaching a strategy. This part needs to only last about 10 minutes. The bulk of this lesson should be guided writing. 

I love this structure for guided writing. It is so important for kids to write with guidance. I was at least doing this part right in my groups last year.
I want to leave you with this quote from Richardson.

Be sure to head over to Maria's blog Kinder-Craze and check out what everyone else had to say about this chapter.

Chapter 3 of The Next Step of Guided Reading

It's time for this week's look at the Freeblicious book study,The Next Step in Guided Reading: Focused Assessments and Targeted Lessons for Helping Every Student Become a Better Reader . I'm loving this book. If you haven't checked it out yet, you should. It is a great resource for guided reading.

I read this chapter while I was on the beach a couple of weeks ago and I was ready to go teach some guided reading right then. I felt like I finally knew what to do with guided reading. I have read several posts about this chapter all ready from the hosts of the chapter and I'm not sure I have anything earth shattering to add. Marsha from A differentiated Kindergarten wrote an incredibly thorough post about the nuts and bolts of the chapter. Jeannie from Kindergarten Lifestyle wrote a great post about tracing letters.
There are two groups of students that Richardson addresses in this chapter. The first is the Pre-A group which is the group that still needs to work on letter knowledge and names. There are four parts for this group that need to be done every time:
1. working with letters and names
2. working with sounds
3. working with books
4. interactive writing
You should work on each of these components each time and work with the group between 15 and 20 minutes. What I really liked about Richardson's outline was that she gave a time frame for each activity.

It breaks down like this:

One of the other points that Richardson makes in this chapter that really stuck with me is the idea that you ask questions about the book that the kids have to answer in complete sentences. This is especially good for the ELL students. I have had a third or more of my class be ELL students the past few years so I'm always looking at ways to help these students. I've also noticed that kids don't seem to have conversation skills anymore. They watch a lot of tv and some of the kids that I work with don't seem to talk a lot to their parents.
The format for the emergent readers is pretty similar but instead of working with letters and names they are working with sight words. Richardson recommends not moving on to a new word until the previous words have been mastered. I typically use the sight words that are in our reading series. In our old series, we had one word a week in kindergarten and then eventually 2 words. In the new series, we start with 1 for the first 10 weeks, then move to 2 words for 5 weeks, then it's 6 for the last 15 weeks. This is a lot more words than I'm use to teaching in one week for kindergarten. I will be using a lot of Richardson's strategies for these learning words. She encourages a lot of writing of the sight words. This is something that I have always found important. I expect my kids to be able to write as well as read the sight words. Here are a couple of her strategies for sight words:

There is tons more information in the book, including some great planning sheets. I know for me the biggest thing is timing. I hope that having this breakdown of time will help me to stay on track with my groups and get what I need to get done. I also love that I have a format to follow. I can plan my groups easier and plan groups for my assistant. I have a half day assistant in kindergarten and a full day assistant in first grade. I'm terrible at planning things for them to do like that. It's hard for me to verbalize what I want done. So I'm hoping using a format like this will help that issue.
Be sure to head over to Marsha's blog and link up with your guided reading thoughts:

Guided Reading Chapter 2

I am excited to be linking up again this week with the ladies at Freeblicious for Chapter 2 of
The Next Step in Guided Reading: Focused Assessments and Targeted Lessons for Helping Every Student Become a Better Reader

I am loving this book. I feel like it is the book I have needed to read. I have read through chapter 4 already and I did that on the beach. This chapter is all about assessment and grouping.

This is one of the biggest ideas that hit me in this chapter. 

The Next Step in Guided Reading: Focused Assessments and Targeted Lessons for Helping Every Student Become a Better Reader

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What do you do for assessments?

I think we are over assessed in schools these days with assessments that don't actually benefit our instruction. At least a lot of the mandated assessments don't. We do a pre assessment before kids enter kindergarten and I'm not sure how beneficial it is. It is used to determine classes but I honestly don't look at it when I'm working on my own instruction. I'll start out with finding out who already knows their name. That will be one of our first activities we do. 

We do a staggered enrollment so the first week we'll only have all the kids about 2 days. So the next week is when I'll start doing an alphavet assessment. I use this paper that one of my fellow teachers had in her files that has shapes, numbers, and letters on it. It looks a lot like this assessment I found on pinterest.

http://pinterest.com/pin/167055467400737294/

This assessment can be found on My Not So Elementary Life's TPT store. (http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Kindergarten-Skills-Inventory-723322

In the past this has really been all the assessing I've done. But after reading this chapter I think I'm going to add a few more components to my assessing. The first thing is a sight word list. I'll be taking the first 10 words that we learn in our reading series. We are adopting Journeys this year so that will be a new list of words. If I have kids that can do all this, then I will move on to dictated sentences and writing assessment. Honestly I probably won't be doing an running records until before Christmas. When I taught in Nashville, we were required to do a lot of reading assessments including running records. As of now, I don't have a good running record resource. So I'll be looking into the new reading series and see what I can use there.

How will you use this information to group your students?

While I plan on assessing the students in the first few weeks of school, I don't plan on starting groups until after the first 6 weeks when we have gotten settled into our workstation and read to self routines. I will have students that don't know a lot of letters start working with my assistant or a volunteer on tracing the alphabet. (This is an idea Richardson talks a lot about in the next chapter.) I will use the information to group my students. I hope to not have too many groups and the groups will be flexible. 

Richardson spend a lot of this chapter explaining how to analyze the information you gain from the assessments. I'll be in kindergarten in the fall so I don't see having to do too many running records, but as the year progresses I'll have to reassess. I will definitely be consulting this book while working through this piece. 

This was the other point that Richardson made that really stuck with me about students' instructional, frustration and independent reading materials.

Be sure to head over to Mary at Sharing Kindergarten and check out the rest of the posts. I can't wait to post all about chapter 3,. It is my favorite so far.

Guided Reading Book Study Chapter 1

I am so excited to be participating in this book study on the book 
The Next Step in Guided Reading: Focused Assessments and Targeted Lessons for Helping Every Student Become a Better Reader

I was really excited because I was able to get the book on my kindle. I love reading professional development books on my kindle because it is so much more portable and it's also a lot cheaper. The downside is it is hard to flip through the book and find something quickly and I can't share it like I could a paper book. (Although I have discovered I can share The Book Whisperer and Growing Readers with a friend of mine.) As a side note, there are lot of forms and such in this book. I did discover that you can get a pdf download of the forms through the scholastic. I just opened the book on the kindle cloud reader on my computer and then clicked where it said get a pdf download. I was very happy.
I don't think guided reading is one of my strengths. I'm good at reading with the kids and working on things with them, but I'm not always good at being really intentional about my groups and planning. This is something I really want to work on. Especially because we've been given a framework to work on this year that involves tiers of RTI. Guided reading to me fits this perfectly.I'm excited to read this book because it gives practical information and actual lessons to follow.
Richardson starts in the introduction by giving the four elements of guided reading:

• analyzing reading assessments to id an instructional focus
• prompting students to use reading strategies when they encounter difficulties
• teaching skills that are necessary and appropriate for the reading stage
• utilizing guiding writing to support and accelerate the reading process

I think I'm pretty good at analyzing data to figure out what I need to teach. I need to focus on my planning of lessons and then executing the lessons. I seem to do a better job at the executing in kindergarten than I do in first grade.

The first chapter is all about preparing for guiding reading. I really like that Richardson emphasizes that students need to learn to work together, read together and laugh and play together.I found this past year that my students really struggled with what it means to work together. I hope that if I start this from the beginning I'll be able to foster an environment that is conducive to that. (Any suggestions for building teamwork would be appreciated.)
Richardson includes a great chart in this chapter that outlines the different approaches of reading and the grouping, text level, how text is read, and purpose. I plan to print this out and include it in my lesson planning notebook.  The approaches to reading are shared, read aloud, small group and independent. Each approach has a place in the classroom. We should be doing a balance of all 4.
The meat of this chapter is about setting up independent learning activities. Last year in first grade, I tried a daily 5 approach, but in kindergarten I really like using literacy stations. I like the 6 week routine that Richardson lays out for introducing literacy stations. She has a very gradual introduction and recommends using tub activities like puzzles, math manipulatives, clay, legos, block, and art projects. Set a time for 10 minutes and have the students work on one of the tubs. Set back and observe and then meet with the students afterwards. You do this each day for a week with each group using a different tub. The next week you introduce one station activity to a group and the rest of the groups work on the tub activities. By week 3 you introduce a new work station activity and lengthen the time to 15 minutes. So now you have 2 workstation activities going on and the rest of the groups are using the tubs. Week 4 you introduce another activity and extend the time to 20 minutes. By week 5, students are working from 25-30 minutes and you add 2 new workstations.Students will also rotate through 2 workstations during the period. By week 6 you have all students working in work stations and don't use the tubs anymore. Richardson suggests starting groups this week, but I personally would probably wait until the next week. Then this gives the students time to be working on workstations and I can observe.
One of the biggest points, she makes in this chapter to establish the routine that students can't interrupt you while you are meeting with a group. She suggests wearing some kind of silly hat that will help the kids see that they shouldn't intrupt you. I used to wear a crown and should probably find something else along those lines.
Richardson finishes up this chapter with a lot of suggestions about managing literacy stations and things that the stations could be. I thought I'd finish this post up with a few pins from pinterest that related to this.

This pin shows a neat way to manage the groups. You use a file folder, velcro and paper. Then you can move the names around without having to start a new sheet.

http://pinterest.com/pin/157555686936688222/

I'm thinking I'm going to use this method for showing the kids not to bother me during groups. I have some lights like this already and it's a fun reminder.

http://pinterest.com/pin/167055467398789338/

These are the big ideas that I took from this chapter. Be sure to head over to Kreative in Kinder for the party and check out what other people had to say about the book.

Whole Group vs. Small Group

So I've been doing some assessing as we've finished up our second unit of reading. And I'm noticing something. About half of my class don't know their letters. And then the ones that do know their letters don't seem to know how to put them together to sound out words. And then I have about 4 students who seem to be ready to read. So what is a girl to do? I realized today when we were doing a worksheet from our reading series about blending words was completely pointless for my kids that don't know their letters at all. I have one kid that when I call on him, his response is "I wasn't raising my hand." I promptly told him that it didn't matter if he had his hand up or not. I'm starting to think I need to restructure some things. Part of my problem is I have 6 ELL students who are not in my room for the hour I teach most of my phonics. Luckily most of them are starting to stay all day and I'll be able to some small group work with them in the afternoon. I say all this to say, I need some help or some ideas. How do you deal with such wide discrepancies in your class? Do you do a lot of whole group instruction or mostly small group instruction? I've been working on my literacy and math centers and they are getting better. I wasn't thinking the kids were ready for a rotation where they go to two centers but maybe they are. Then my next question is what are some strategies you use for working on letter identification and blending? I just bought Deanna Jump's guided reading kit and I'm excited about using it. Any advice would be appreciated or just hearing what you do.