The Crazy Pre-K Classroom

For quite a while now I have been looking for a Guided Reading system that worked for my classroom. I needed something that the class would get excited about, kept the parents informed of progress and was easy for me to maintain. After looking through various blogs, products and polling other teachers I realized I had to create my own system. There just wasn't anything that met enough of my needs out there that I could find. So for several months now I have been piecing together what may be the best thing I have ever made for my classroom. INDIVIDUAL GUIDED READING BINDERS!!!!! Here is a view of one of the front cover choices: I had always used simple folders with a reading log and the weeks books. There was no space to send home more literacy building resources that the children could work on. When I would send home extra resources in the kiddos backpacks I would either never get them back or they would get lost in the child's home for a while. I also wanted everything for...

Hello all, I hope all of you came through the holidays well and are looking forward to spring! Here in Texas we had 2 ice days and a couple of late starts which is highly unusual for us but I know some of you have missed much more than that! Anyway, this year I have four children who are very advanced in their reading skills. They have mastered cvc words, cvcv/cvvc words and the dolche pre-primer and primer sight words. We are now moving into intial consonant blends and digraphs. This week I started by introducing l, s and r initial blends on a binder ring, I gave each child a set and had a master set for myself. We went through each set before doing anything else. I then took the posters out for several of the l blends and we went over several objects that start with each blend. We then spent some time thinking about other words that start with this blend and recorded them on our critical thinking posters. I then used pocket chart sentences to show how we could use the words properly ...

In Pre-K and Kinder working with numbers is just as important as word work. We spend alot of time talking about manipulating letters for reading but not much time talking about manipulating numbers. Sure counting forwards and backwards is important but if you cannot identify what number comes before or after then there is a problem. Leaving holes like this in the learning of numbers and math strategies can cause frustration for children later in their education. Count and color is an excellent way to help children understand one to one correspondence and how to stop counting at a certain number. I have often found in my classroom that when you ask a child to count objects they either skip, go to fast or cannot stop till they get to 10. These habits all need to be worked on before they become a permannent way for the child to work with numbers. This also brings in the importance of 10 frames, having a child place one object in each box allows them to decifer between each box and the obj...