Skills Centers in 2013

Once a week during Skills Block, we bring out Skills Centers for the children to practice.  These are hands-on activities that encourage the children to practice the skills we have been working on.  While the groups are working it gives us time to work with a single child or a small group that might need just a little extra to master a skill.

At this time of year we are working on skills that require the student to put the onset and short a rime together and then to match the sounds to represent each picture.

 There are many centers that require the students to match initial alphabet letters to pictures.

 The center below is one of the examples of work with ending sounds. In this center, students are expected to match scoops and cones that have the same ending sounds.

We are in our last two weeks of our phonemic awareness study of Nursery Rhymes.  As part of listening and playing with the sounds in the rhymes we also talk about print conventions such as where the nursery rhyme starts and how it moves from left to right and top to bottom.  We also use the rhymes to practice pointing under each word so these centers ask the student to use the rhyme that they know well and to match the words in order.  This is a challenging center for many of the children this time of year so they often work with a partner.

 There are several different centers that ask the students to put the letters of the alphabet in order or that ask them to find missing letters in the order.

 Dot-to-dot alphabet sequencing is a favorite activity that requires the student to remember the sequence of the letters.

Names are the center of many activities these first few weeks of school so this activity asks students to copy the names of their friends with and without a written model.