SC Kindergarten Teachers Conference

Earlier this month, I went to the SC Kindergarten Teachers Conference presented by SDE. This is the first year I have been to the conference in 5 years because our district has not allowed teachers to travel for professional development unless they initiate the professional development. I was so excited to find out that I could attend. As in previous years, this was a wonderful conference that had so many wonderful presenters. 

I got to meet the fabulous Dr. Jean. She was the keynote speaker on the first day of the conference so she started all of us out by singing and dancing. It was lots of fun. I also went to 2 of her workshops. She gave some great ideas for teaching sight words to our kinders. One of my favorite ideas she gave was to write the sight words on paper plates as a different way to review sight words. The circle shapes draw the students' eyes to the middle of the circle which keeps their focus better than a square or rectangle shape. 

I decided to recreate her idea and make the circles on my computer. I made a set of sight word circles for the Journeys reading series sight words and my kinders are loving them. They think it is special to get to read the sight words from the circles.

 On the second day, I met the wonderful Heidi Butkus of Heidi's Songs. She was another great presenter. She led us in the singing of some of her songs and gave ideas for teaching CVC words and word families to our students. She also gave ideas for working with the struggling readers/learners in our classroom. 

I will be sharing more ideas from the conference in the upcoming weeks so stay tuned!  

Friday Freebie: Word Family Practice Sheets

I have been working on creating some word family practice sheets to have my students practice the word families we have learned so far. I am sending these sheets home with my students so they can practice reading the words with their parents. Since many of the words are CVC words, they shouldn't have any problems reading them. I am also hoping that the parents will be able to understand word families better through these sheets as well. 

These sheets are a downloadable pack through my TpT store for free. I hope you can use them as well. Please leave me some feedback if you download them.

Word Families Practice Sheets

Wacky, Wonderful Weather

We have been working on our weather unit. We will continue this unit next week. Here are the things I have created to go with this unit.

What's in the Cloud? CVC words

I wanted something for my independent kiddos to do during group time and this activity sheet is just the thing I needed. I created this activity sheet for my kinder kids to practice stretching sounds in CVC words. This is an essential reading skill and something that most of the kinders I have worked with need extra practice on.

Umbrellas & Raindrops Word Family Sort

This is an activity that I created for my assistant to do with her small group during our guided reading time. The students will work together to sort the raindrops onto the correct word family umbrella. These are all word families that we have already focused on. You could also have your kinders do this as an independent center.

You can't really tell from this picture but I printed the umbrellas on light purple paper.

I hope you can use these activities too! Please leave a comment if you download. I love getting your feedback. Thanks!