Saddle Up for Skills Block

Skills Block is the foundation of the early weeks in Kindergarten. This standard-based bulletin board showcases the multiplicity of work that is going on in the Kindergarten classes.

Skills Block starts with a warm-up. It is usually a review of an activity from the day before such as clapping syllables, rhyming, beginning sounds, recognizing letters and sound, etc.

Nursery rhymes are the backbone of our program in phonemic awareness. Students work on skills such as hearing beginning sounds, blending, and segmenting that will help them hear the individual sounds as they write words and will help them blend sounds as they read words.

"Star Names" is our phonics program where we use the names of the students to introduce the class to letters and sounds. The children LOVE this activity and can't wait until it is their turn to be the star student! The teachers sing songs and chants with the letters of each name, cut the letters apart and put them back together, interview the student and write sentences, etc. This program will continue until each child has had a turn being the star.

Each day the teacher chooses one student to lead the ABC activities. The student chant and sing the letters and the sounds each day.

Skills Centers or "Table Work" as it is called in some classrooms, offer the children a chance to work independently on the skills they are learning. In this classroom the children spend 10 minutes each day working through one of six centers that are meant to practice the current skills.

This is a great bulletin board for Open House, which will be later this week, to help parents "see" all of the activities that children are doing each morning! This is truly a peek into the classroom.