Back to business! We started a snow unit of study this week. We began with a short video found on Discovery Education. It explained the conditions required to have snow and it had very good video of real winter conditions. This is something children here are not exposed to. The climate in southern California is not conducive to creating true winter weather.
Then we interactively wrote winter words that we brainstormed on our penguin chart.
Each child received a "Winter Word" book from Enchanted Learning to follow up this activity.
We had a little fun painting a snowflake with this idea from PreKinders.
We reviewed CVC words with an activity I learned long ago. It is a McCracken strategy for teaching phonics through writing. You wouldn't think the children would be excited to sound out words and write them, but they are! I think the children love it so much because they get to use a whiteboard and a marker! I start by telling them the number of lines for the number of sounds they need to listen for. They draw those lines and then I give them the word. They need to write each sound on the line to create the word. We go over each word on my whiteboard at the front of the room. If there are any who don't get everything correctly written, they get to see what they did wrong. This is a great way to quickly assess students since when they hold up their boards you can see quickly who has it and who doesn't.
We also used these sight word coloring sheets from Starfall to review high frequency words.
Did you know that you can get these as a free samples from Starfall?
It is better if you purchase the yearly subscription and have access to everything. I purchased it when my son was in kindergarten and it was great. I was able to use it at home for him and for my classroom too. At any rate, this is a "color by word" free demo. You can edit the words on the list to match those you need to review or teach. Visit their site by clicking the link below:
(I am not trying to advertise for Starfall. I have just found, in my experience, they have useful items.)
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