After a summer of uneventfulness, finally, the big week arrived. Dustan and I went to Albuquerque for the
weekend for my cousin Lane’s wedding. We
had a great time and I found a fantabulous dress to wear at my new favorite
dress shop, The Dress Barn. (I’m turning
into a little old lady, what can I say?) After the big day for Lane and his new
bride, Chelsea, Sunday Dustan flew home with my family to KC and I boarded a
plane to Las Vegas. You know what they
say about Vegas, right? What happens in
Vegas ends up on Facebook. I’m not here
for the craziness, I’m here for the National I Teach K! kindergarten
conference. Let the professional
developing begin. It’s four days of
everything kindergarten. It will also be
an extra suitcase to check with all my goodies I have to have.
After getting in last night and getting settled I fell asleep and woke
up early as I’m still on Kansas time. I
got in a quick in room workout via YouTube and was ready to go 10 minutes
early. I’m here with my friend, Jill,
and she had already beat me downstairs.
We were quick to walk next door to the Venetian hotel and get our
registration packet. We hurried to get
our seats in the keynote speaker area.
We were four rows from the front.
Jill told me people would assume we were administrators as that’s where
they always sit at during conferences.
The following are my reflections and notes of interest from my sessions
today.
Keynote: Jack Hartman (famous kid/educational musician), Donna Whyte
(famous author for teacher guide books) and Sharron Krull (never heard of her)
Jack did several of his songs for us and had props for all the songs he
did. HE did a great penguin song with lots of
movements. The problem was Jack’s
microphone wasn’t the best and kept cutting out so I missed the actual name of
the song! I’m hoping to find it
later. He also did a song called Silly
Rockstar which had audience participation with teachers dressed as a rapper,
cheerleader, astronaut, cowgirl and an Egyptian. It was a lot of fun. Jack stressed how important movement is in
the daily school routine. Without
movement we have kids sitting too long and mentally checking out. He also is a big proponent of movement to
combat childhood obesity. The only part
I did have a non-alignment of beliefs with the man is when he went on for a
good minute about how terrible our kids our and how bad off they are and how we
have troubles in this country. (His fix for this was more movement in public schools.) I don’t believe that our kids our terrible
and that mindset is not healthy for educators and it isn’t healthy for the
general public. We have great kids in
this country and we as teachers are faced with the challenge of educating all
students. We are lucky to live in a
country where everyone gets a chance for a full education. I didn’t appreciate his rhetoric on this one.
I had seen Donna Whyte before
and I loved her. She does the best kid
voice when telling stories. It is best
appreciated in person. She tells
wonderful stories. She talked about how
as teachers we need to quit answering all the kids questions. So true!
We are quick with an answer instead of giving kids time to muddle
through and wrestle with their own thoughts in exchange for the quick fix. She talked a lot of about kids needing to
talk in our classrooms to gain necessary vocabulary so when they are ready to
learn to read and write. If kids are
sitting quietly (which is the ideal classroom setting for some teachers) they
aren’t practicing their oral language skills to further their learning in
kindergarten and as they move down the road into the next grades.
Sharon Krull was a trooper as she fought microphone problems the entire
time she was on stage. She had several
activities using a single juggling scarf.
Using a scarf she had us make shapes by folding it and talk about what
shapes we made, then we sorted ourselves by big triangles, little triangles
then we made a new shape with our scarf.
We practiced throwing it in the air and clapping the number of times we
were told for a concrete approach to number sense. We also practiced throwing it and catching it
to make it balance on a body part. We
also did a game where we threw the scarf from one hand to another practicing a
teacher skill crossing the midline.
Crossing the midline is important because it makes your brain work and
transfer thinking from one side of the brain to the other, strengthen the
synapses in your brain and making more connections. This was also a good activity because it was
developing reading skills such as tracking from left to right and returning
your eyes back which we all do when we read.
She emphasized how important it was to find ways to use movement to meet
the needs of your students while still incorporating learning.
Session 1: Math Centers & Games: Practice, Exploration & Fun
Catherine Kuhns
Catherine Kuhns is the author of several math teacher resource books
for teachers. I have one and use it all
the time. She spent a great deal of time
discussing how important is that we remember that kids learn through play. She reminded us that kids need lots of
practice first with concrete activities, touching, feeling and manipulating
things. Then they can move to a pictorial
representation to practice their learning followed by the abstract idea. She also discussed how important it is for
kids to talk when they are learning. She
never sends a kid to an activity alone; they must go with another student
because kids need to talk about what they are doing in order for greater
learning to take place. She went throw
tons of activities for learning centers but I really learned a lot on her ideas
for discussing learning. She stressed
when teaching sorting you need to start by only sorting by 2 attributes; ex:
Velcro/not Velcro shoes, black/not black shoes, etc. Time needs to be spent discussing the sorting
rule and then releasing the kids into having them tell you the sorting rule or
making them figure out the sorting rule.
Too often the teacher will say I want you to sort by color which takes
the learning away from the child and places it in the hands of the teacher
instead of where it needs to be with our kids.
She had kids draw their favorite cookie and then they did a whole group
activity with sorting their cookies by different kid assigned attributes. Once the kids had practiced in a guided
setting with the cookies they were moved for independent practice to a learning
center. She also had many good ideas
made from Solo cups, she liked 100 charts and had them plastered inside her
classroom bathroom. She talked about how
important math models are and how kids need to use language to make story
problems with concrete toys first before they move to the next step of drawing
it or putting the equation down. She was
very big on the concrete activity must come before the pictorial. Really she had so many wonderful ideas and
I’m glad I have her book as some of them came out of my book but I wasn’t ready
to use them until she showed me a concrete example of how useful they can be.
Session 2: Phantastic Phonics Phun & Games!
Karin Huttsell
Karin was obviously a very talented teacher and has her National Board
Certified Teacher certification to back this up. She spent several minutes going over how important
it is to have both phonics and phonemic awareness learning in the
classroom. She showed us how to make several
different games that could be used with various skills. She had a Firecracker game made from a
Pringles can with popsicle sticks inside the can coded with upper/lower case
letters, sight words, etc. and the kids pulled a stick out and would read what
was on the stick. If they pulled one of
the BOOM sticks they had to put all their sticks back into the can. There are many variations of this game on
Pinterest.
It was at this session that Jill informs me that she has over 100
stamps with pictures on them for beginning and ending sound practice. She got them from Lakeshore before the ease
of the internet. I’m going to borrow
them. They sound cool.
Session 3: Literacy Activities for Your Smart Board
Cheryl Dick
Cheryl is a 4th grade teacher with excellent ideas. She showed us how to manipulate our SMART
Boards to make games and change games we find in the SMART exchange. She showed us how to use the vortex feature,
just type in VORTEX into the find box on your SMART board menu and it will
bring up the vortex. What it does it
will “swallow” up a picture or text if you drop it into a correct sorting
category or reject it if it is wrong.
You just program it with whatever you’d like. If you’re like me you like your SMART board
you just know you are smart enough to know that you aren’t using it to its
fullest potential. With her lessons and
what I learned earlier this summer at a tech class I took from the district I
finally feel like I may be getting a little stronger and more comfortable with
my SMART board to use it for more than a classy whiteboard and to play games
already made from the internet. I also
find great satisfaction that you can make games that you then throw a Koosh
ball at the board to break a bubble or balloon and then do the activity hiding
behind. I mean who wouldn’t like that? She has a website with all her ideas at:
www.cherylsclassroomtips.com
Dollar Store Diva!
Kim Adsit
Kim is a well-known seller on the Teachers Pay Teachers website which
is a place for teachers to sell their resources to other teachers. She is one of those people I really
envy. She can look at some odd item and
go, “Gosh, you know that would make a great penguin,” and then turn an oversized
wooden spoon into a penguin. She also
had very strong opinions onto which type of glue you should be using for your
classroom props: E6000. Her creativity
was amazing. She turned a splatter guard
for a skillet into pumpkins for the poem 5 Little Pumpkins. She made frogs out of sand toy shovels, for 5
Little Speckled Frogs. She used small
yard game racquets for pig puppets for a pig song. She made puppets/props out of slippers, hats,
ice scoops, colanders and kitty litter scoops!
Seriously, would you walk past the kitty litter scoop and say, “Gosh,
you know, I think this would be the perfect base for my animal prop?” No I wouldn’t because I can’t see multiple
uses for everyday things. Her reasoning
for using rhymes and songs was practicing prosody according to About.com is the
use of pitch, loudness, tempo and rhytm in speech to convey information about
the structure and meaning of an utterance.
Acting out the songs also help with story retelling, which is part of
our new Common Core State Standards (CCSS).
Also when you do songs such as 5 Little Monkeys it helps kids learn
about shrinking patterns (or in other cases growing patterns), which is a
algebraic concept. She also encourages
the use of the props to get kids moving to add another modality to their
learning. She had wonderful ideas! She was the queen of the Dollar Store. She used metal cookie sheets for every
activity imaginable. She turned flashcards
into book that then would corspond to songs from favorite singers, such as Dr. Jean.
She used fun sunglasses and pointers for learning centers such as read and
write the room. She used garden gloves
for practicing syllables. She said it wasn’t necessary to have all these tools
for kids to learn certain skills. However, it provides a hook for our kids to
get them to do activities more easily.
She pointed out that they cool Captain Hook hook isn’t necessary for a
read the room activity but what kid isn’t going to want to put it on? Once the hook
is on the kid will have to do your activity to keep the hook from being
taken away so there is some motivation to keep the hook. There is an added motivation to learn. Kids love toys and if they can play while
they learn they won’t necessarily see our teaching as work.
Summary: The big themes that
kept popping up throughout the day were movement, talking and play. Kids are naturally made to move. They need movement incorporated into their
learning. Kids need to play to
learn. It’s how kindergarteners learn
through playing and experimenting with materials. Mistakes are a bad thing. Play is how kids learn to interact with each
other. Donna Whyte pointed out kids
don’t learn how to share at home anymore because each one has their own tv,
their own iWhatever, and their own Gameboy.
They don’t have to wait for a sibling to finish so they can take a
turn. School is where some kids get
their first experiences with waiting and sharing. Kids practice and better gain understanding
through communicating what they are doing, analyzing what they discover and
talking through activities with teachers and peers. The best thing we can do as teachers is to be
quiet and listen.
Tuesday is shaping up to be a great day. Now if I can find some free internet in this
town I could post this. Apparently, the
only thing free in this town are numerous advertising flyers.
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