Ready 2 Read Unit 2: Day 2

A while back, Josie posted about a Ready2Read program done by The Moffatt Girls. There is 8 units and each unit has 5 sight words and 2 "family" words (ei. all words that end in -at are a part of the "at" family group.). She uses a lot of worksheets and have the units broken up in 5 small sections that I can easily do a lesson in 30 minutes.  Fortunately, I was able to get all the units before she started selling them.  I've already done Unit 1 but I'm not going to back blog about that. Unit 1's sight words were I, a, see, and, the. The family words were -at and -an.

My goal is to set up a homework time routine after school. However, kindergartners don't get homework and Hailey doesn't even have assigned reading time. So instead of homework, I want to do these mini reading lessons and switch off with Joy School lessons. After lunch, Hannah naps for almost 2 hours and I nap with her for 1 hour. So that leaves us 1 hour for school time. 

They already had a day with Unit 2 a few weeks ago, so when I should Hailey these flash cards with the sight words (can, you, look, up, is) Hailey read them without any problems. First, we decorated the sight words.

 Robert can and helped too. He likes to glue a lot.

 Then we added the -ig family words by having Hailey read a little -ig book and doing an -ig word slide.

Here's a video of Hailey reading one of the pages.  She struggles just a little but is doing wonderfully, even with a loud little brother to distract her.

 Here's a better picture of what a word slide is.

Then they finished with a little worksheet.  They are given a sentence, then can trace it below. After that they can cut the words out and glue them in the correct order in the black box.  Hailey doesn't like cutting them anymore, so she just wrote the sentence.

This is of course above what Robert can do but he still wanted to be involved. So, I traced and then wrote the sentence out while he told me what the letters were.

This is generally their TV time so they were a bit distracted and anxious to go back to the TV.  Hopefully we can get a good routine going.

Preschool: Trains (monday)

Today, preschool was at Edmund's house.  Robert did not want to go to preschool and even pooped his pants right as we were leaving.  Luckily, this meant Edmund's mom, Jamie, didn't have to deal with any accidents from him. In fact, Robert even used their potty which surprised me.



The theme for this week is trains, so when I came to pick up Robert, he did not want to leave at all.  They made a shape train and wrote the letter T on their paper.  Robert told Jamie that we had black paper at home, so he wanted everything black.  They also practice blowing into plastic water bottles for their train whistle.  They ended the day playing with a few trains, which Robert loved.  Hopefully, he'll be more willing to go on Wednesday.

Preschool: Car Wash Friday

To end the car theme, we had a car wash Friday morning.

Hannah's washing the outside and Robert is doing the inside.  It's nice to see them working together.

There were also little toy cars that they could wash.

Robert started washing Hannah, which is why she has soap in her hair.

I think they really liked this activity and spent about 45 minutes doing it.

After everyone was dried (and we had to change outfits), we read some cars and truck books that I borrowed from the library.  It was a good way to pass the time in the morning.

Kindergarten: Friday wrap-up

Hailey has gone to Kindergarten for five days now and she loves it.  The kids and I enjoy walking her to school and picking her up.

 Hailey still doesn't tell us much about school.  On Thursday, there was a fire drill and she got pushed to the back of the line. She was very sad about this. 

On Friday, they had music time and sang hello in spanish.  Also on Friday, Hailey brought home a lot of papers.

 This paper is an assessment on writing your name (her A and Y are uppercase), write 0-10 (Hailey's 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9 are backwards but I've very impressed that she wrote all the numbers), and write the alphabet upper and lower case (Hailey only did A-G uppercase but it looks like she has worked very hard). It's nice to now where she's at and I'm excited to see how she will progress throughout the year.

 Here's just a random picture she drew. She didn't tell me anything about it.

 Then Hailey traced the color words with the correct color. 

 I'm not sure what she's graphing but using an example Hailey only wrote 4 backwards.

Darlene told me that they were doing rainbow tracing. Kids like to trace with different colors so that's what the activity was.

Kindergarten: Number Order

Hailey's handout today was from a math activity.  Hailey talked about chuck e cheese (which was want she called all the mice) played hockey.  She did a great job cutting (which is a skill I haven't worked with her much) and she put them all in the correct order. I'm not sure if they have reading time the same day they do math because Hailey didn't have any stories to tell me. I hope I get an opportunity to volunteer in her classroom a couple of times, but who knows how that will go with 2, almost 3 kids still at home.

Preschool: Cars and Street Signs

The preschool group has officially started.  There is Chelsie (will be 5 in Dec), Edmund (who just turned 4), Jenna (will turn 4 in Dec), and Robert (who's 3 1/2).  Of course, there is also Hannah when we are at my house.

We started preschool on the couch singing a little song about cars that www.notimeforflashcards.com had.

Little Red Car

http://www.notimeforflashcards.com/2008/01/little-red-car.html

Vroom! Vroom ! Went the little red car one day,
Vroom! Vroom! Went the little red car!
Vroom! Vroom! Went the little red car one day ,
and they all went Vroom! Vroom! Skreeeeeech!
But we all know cars go ,
beep beep beep beep beep,
beep beep beep beep beep,
beep beep beep beep beep

We all know cars go ,
beep beep beep beep beep
They don’t go , Vroom! Vroom! Skreeeeeech!

Robert and Jenna loved it. I think Edmund liked it and Chelsie just wanted to hold Hannah.

Then we read "My Car" by Byron Barton.  This books has really easy words and sentences. Hailey was able to read it with very little help just the other day. It also has colorful, simple pictures which got the message to the kids right away.

Before, I lost their attention completely, we moved to the floor and played "Crazy Cars" created by www.kellyskindergarten.com It is just little cards with Lighting McQueen on them and a letter of the alphabet, either upper- or lower- case.  The goal say what the letter is and collect as many cars as you can.  Robert knew all the letters while Chelsie and Jenna really struggled.  Edmund knew most of the letters. There were also "key" cards where you got to take another person's car and there were "flag" cards that ended the game.  It was a good game to let me know how familiar the kids are with their letters.

 Then the kids were pretty much ready to be done with school, so I pulled out the car road map I got from familyfun.go.com (Disney magazine) and pulled out our big bucket of cars.  This was a big hit.

 I also had this track that when to a little people airport set.

 When the kids started getting a little possessive (mainly Robert), I took them outside and pointed out our street signs since we live on the corner.  We talked about how it was green.  So, we can inside and put felt letters on green paper so everyone can have a street named after them.

 Edmund was the first one I worked with. He told me that his name started with an E but that he didn't know the rest. So I pulled all the letters out for him (I really meant to do that before the kids got here anyhow), and while my attention was turned to the other kids, he did his name sign all by himself.

 Jenna was very cute and wanted to add a lot of different letters to her name like X.  So she needed a lot of help but was entertaining to work with.

 Poor Chelsie has a hard time with her name because the "ch" is very tricky to understand.  However, she had great fine motor skills and could take the white backing off the letters. She even helped Robert out too.

Then there's Robert, who knows how to spell his name and could put all his letters down in the right order, going the correct way but just couldn't get the backing off.  He wanted a picture too and decided to pose like that.

So that ended our activities at preschool and they spent the last 5-10 minutes playing outside.  While there were outside they saw a stop sign and pointed it out. I wanted to do a little more of the different street signs but the few a had, I forgot to cut out and had a hard time finding the basic signs to print out.  Also, I wanted to do Green Light/Red Light but again I just didn't get it ready and the kids were just done.  I'm so excited to work with these kids and seeing their neat personalities shine.  I've already observed how Chelsie loves to play mommy and just wanted to hold Hannah and carry her everywhere.  Surprisingly, Hannah didn't mind too much.  It really shocked me (in a good way) to see a little girl being so loving to a younger kid. While Robert on the other hand just runs them over.

Preschool will be every Monday and Wednesday for an hour.  Next week is Edmund's mom's turn and she is doing trains.  I'm really excited for this group.

Kindergarten rainbow house

When I went to pick up Hailey from school, she showed me this beautiful painting she did.  It's a house (not a mountain like I originally thought) and it has a rainbow. 

During reading time, she read a book about a little girl who was sick and turned rainbow colors. She also changes and had polka dots. Then she turned into a house and her mouth was her bed.  She really liked this book and talked a lot about it.  After talking to Darlene, I think that book is called "A Bad Case of the Stripes" by David Shannon. The amazon description of the book is "Camilla Cream loves lima beans, but she never eats them. Why? Because the other kids in her school don't like them. And Camilla Cream is very, very worried about what other people think of her. In fact, she's so worried that she's about to break out in...a bad case of stripes!"