Vegas Day 3

I really can’t believe that day three is already over and I only have tomorrow left.  I am having a ball and learning so much.  Today’s learning was by far the most intense.  We had excellent presenters all day, every single one of them.  I took nine pages of typed notes and Jill took 15 pages of hand written notes in our sessions.  Yes, there were that many great ideas.

Boasting Fluency Development

Pat Pavelka
Pat wasted no time and got right into the good stuff.  We really like that. 
*She explained how important it is for students to be able to read punctuation marks so they will have fluency when reading as these are the clues for intonation when reading.  We quickly made a period, question mark and exclamation point on 3 index cards and started playing games.  She started by having us reading an alphabet strip and every time we came to a highlighted letter we would have to read it with the correct punctuation.  She would hold a punctuation card over a kids head and everyone in the class would say that child’s name using the correct intonation for that punctuation and then the child would guess what punctuation was being held above his head. She also had various sentences such as: The dog ate your homework or We’re having pizza for dinner and then when she held up a punctuation card the kids would read it with the correct punctuation intonation.  She had several other ideas using these cards.  She suggested the book Yo! Yes! by Chris Raschka as a good book for punctuation practice as it has very few words in it. 
*Sight words are another key to fluency for students.  Without a bank of sight words students do not have automaticity in their reading.  She gave us this research: “The average child needs between 4 and 14exposures to a new word to recognize it automatically.  However, children with reading difficulties need 44 or more exposures to a new word.”  Wiley Blevins Building Fluency: Lesson & Strategies for Reading Success 2001.  She had fabulous ways of practicing sight word in class.  When practicing sight words she puts in 70% known words and 30% unknown words so kids have continued success.  She makes bracelets that the kids wear around the school with words such as: a is the is red is (the word to learn is: IS) and when the kid is out and about the school upper grade kids and teachers can stop and ask him to read his bracelet (or stamp a watch face on it and it’s a watch for hesitant boys).  This gets those repeated exposures so the student can learn his word.  What if the student doesn’t know any words?  Throw in letters or numbers that the child knows to read around his new sight words.  She plays a game where she has a snowglobe and the student has to say it-spell it-say it as many times as he can before all the snow falls in the globe. 

Creating Hans-On Literacy and Math Centers Using Children’s Books as Themes

Angie Bonthuis
Angie was a practitioner presenter.  It basically it means she’s a regular teacher giving one presentation and she doesn’t do this on a regular basis, yet.  Angie is a teacher from Iowa and she has a website: www.ilovekindergarten.com which will link you to her blog and Teachers Pay Teachers (TPT) store as well.  She has many of her ideas as freebies on her TPT store.  Angie bases all of weekly teaching around one book that she calls her theme book and then she brain storms all of the ideas she can teach from standards from the book.  She also brings in many other fiction and non-fiction texts to support the theme book.  She literally had TONS of ideas.  Checking out her TPT store and website will give you a broader scope of some of her idea.  Kindergarten is her life.
*She makes tons of her own games and she makes many of the same games over and over using different themes.  Many of the games you could make yourself and she even said so in her presentation.  An easy game you could program many different ways would be to use the excess wooden building blocks that come with our math curriculum and program them with numbers, letter, sight words, etc. Then kids work in pairs picking blocks out of draw string bags (or whatever works for you) and reading what is on the block and then stacking it.  The first person’s tower to fall over is considered the non-winner (or loser).  J  She also does the same thing with coding the tippy-tops of the dominos.
*A neat game she made to go with the book Hi Pizza Man! Is she makes front doors and puts house numbers on the doors.  She then hides a character cutout from the book under the door and the kids take turns guessing the house number (by reading the number) where the character is hidden.  She also incorporates language (because kids can’t learn if they don’t talk-they have to process things out loud) by making them use a complete sentence to say: the snake is not behind house number 14. 

Boosting Kindergarten Literacy with Name Games

Shari Sloane
Shari is a famous teacher singer and author.  She sang for us during our presentation and we were impressed.  Luckily I only sing in front of 5 year olds so I don’t have to worry about singing in front of groups, nor do I have to worry about the royalties from my teacher music CDs.  Her ENTIRE session was on name games.  Name games galore.  I thought I would start out my school year incorporating name games at the beginning of the year but she has name games and books for the entire year.  She was a kind soul and reminded us the she doesn’t do every single game and book that she showed us in our session every year.  Visit her website at: www.kidscount1234.com
*She has the kids make name cheer books and she keeps them together in her classroom.  Whenever they have a moment or need a moment, she’ll pick out a name cheer and the child who was picked will come to the front of the class and lead the cheer, sometimes with a pom-pom.   The book will have the words printed on each page with one letter per page: Give me a M, choral: M, Give me a A, A; Give me a N, N; Give me a D, D; Give me a Y, Y; What does that spell? Mandy! She said they usually have to do a couple names at a time. She also makes I Have…Who Has? with class pictures.  She’ll write kids names on 12x18 construction paper and then have the kids use bingo daubers to stamp out their name.  A good tip she had was when making a big class book to support a song in your class (and she had tons of name songs-go to her website) she recommends that you bind the book so you can fold down the pages instead of trying to turn the side to side or flip them up.  Genius!
*She uses names in math.  She makes scattergrams in which the child gets an entire set of alphabet letters, she teaches them how to cut out long strips, where you cute down the entire line instead of cutting out each individual letter (a personal pet peeve of mine-drive me crazy) and then the kids glue the letters that are in their name on one side of the paper with a smiley face and glue the letters that are not in their name on the side with the sad face. They do whole class graphs in which the kids get small stickers and they come up and place a sticker in each letter column for which they have that letter in their name.  This way we can see which letters are most frequent in the names in our class. 

Reading and Math and Science Oh, My!

Deanna Jump
Deanna is the highest selling teacher on TPT.  It is said she made $700,00+ last year alone.  I wish I was cutesy and computer-y.  She believes in using integrated curriculum as the base for her teaching, also known as theme teaching.  She starts planning her lessons by first picking a science or social studies standard and builds from there by picking fiction and non-fiction text to support the standard she chose.  She does this because the brain thrives on connections and it gets kids excited about learning. 
*If you buy one of Deanna’s units from her TPT store you’ll quickly discover that she likes glyphs.  Before I thought the glyphs were cute but we don’t necessarily always have time for a craft.  However, she explained that she doesn’t do anything without having a standard with it and once the glyph is made then she’ll have her students write a special story about their glyph, in the case of the one I bought a pirate.  Wouldn’t that have been so simple to have had the kids write a story about their pirate after we finished making them?  Geez! No wonder I’m not making $700,000 on TPT.  She does this with other things they do as well.  I began to start thinking I need to reevaluate every time I want to do something cute but think I don’t time and begin to turn it around and think, what curriculum standard I can meet by adding this to our day.  Not just for the cutesy stuff either but for all things I do.  
*Deanna is a big believer in interactive writing, schema charts, and chit-chat. Her chit-chat charts are a way to review important information that students have already learned but have blanks in them for the kids to help fill in (whole group on carpet) to complete the chit-chat.  For example she may leave out numbers, whole words, beginning sounds, etc for some of the words in her chit-chat message.  On her schema charts they initially write or draw what they think they know on sticky notes and put them under the column: What we think we already know.  Then as they learn more about the topic there is a place to record new learning and a place to move things from the what we think we already know to a misconceptions column.  She likes the misconceptions column so no one’s thoughts are devalued by being removed and trashed but just relocated.  She also makes lots of illustrations that the class then labels and also have each kid with their own individual copy to label as you do your class one on the board.  Labeling is the precursor to emergent writing.  We’ve heard that a lot this week. 

Summary

We heard a lot today about theme and integrated curriculum teaching.  Someone said if you can’t get at least two standards out of an activity you shouldn’t be doing it.  I’m not sure I believe that completely but I do think I should start evaluating how I can integrate more than one standard into each activity and try to see if I am not getting more than one.  I really liked Pat first thing this morning as she was amazing in a non-showy way.  She took simple idea and made them work in many areas all throughout the year.  Angie did this in a less subtle way by taking the same game and  tweaking it with clipart and/or manipulatives for each of her themes.  They were the same basic games week to week so she didn’t have to reteach the rules every time.  I also liked how Pat had her research posted with the author and study so we could write it down quickly to back up what we are doing in our classrooms with the why aspect.  Deanna’s presentation was fun because I finally met someone whose blog I read often and materials I purchase from TPT.  Another famous to me blogger, Fran Kramer, was in the session two rows ahead of me.  So I got to stare at the back of her head for an hour and 15 minutes.  She’s shorter than I had imagined.  Today was an absolute wonderful day. 
Tonight Jill and I got a little crazy and went down to Circus Circus to play the slots.  Jill doubled her money and I lost all of mine.  Go figure.  Now Jill can go buy those shoes she’s been admiring all week in the exibit hall.  We thought it was a little cruel to have shoes in a teachers exhibit hall.  We are weak “soles” when it comes to shoes.  (Terrible pun, I know.)  Tomorrow is it for us.  I’m still trying to determine if I will buy a grey fleece jacket with a school embroidery on it.  I’ve bought way too many books.  Luckily, I brought an extra suitcase inside my other suitcase so I have plenty of room to bring my stuff home.  I’ve thought this out, NBLB-No Book Left Behind.  Until tomorrow.