First of the Year Kindergarten Bulletin Boards

Nursery Rhymes are a popular bulletin board for the first standard-based bulletin board in Kindergarten.  The board to the left includes a delightful illustration of the beginning, middle and end of the nursery rhyme Humpty Dumpty which helps a student begin to see that even very short stories have beginnings, middles, and ends.  It is amazing the detail that some kindergartners can already put into their pictures! This board also includes a worksheet where students have to draw some of the vocabulary words in the rhyme such as wall, King, men, horse.  It also includes a rhyming activity where students have to draw a rhyming word for some of the words that the students have been working with such as drawing a picture of a word that rhymes with wall (ball). 

This board on the right also focuses on the nursery rhymes that are part of our early learning but in this case the entire focus of the board is phonological awareness - the rhyming activites that are being taught through the rhymes.  For instance, the rhyme Hickory Dickory Dock includes the rhymes hickory-dickory, dock-clock, and one-run.  The board shows several rhyming activities such as listing words that are in the -ock family, being given a picture and selecting or cutting out another picture that rhymes with the pictured word.  Rhyming is such a fundamental skill because it is so hard for students to move forward if they cannot hear rhyming at the end of words!

Mrs. Roberts also features work with Nursery Rhymes on her bulletin board.  Her board includes several activites, also with rhyming words but the activity that is unique is her work is with the SmartBoard to teach rhming with the nursery rhymes.  Bet the children are mesmerized!

This board is all about "name" activites including combining the work we do in nursery rhymes to teach phonological awareness by using  a child's name.  We know that there is no more important word to a child than his own name so the board shows how you can substitute the class.  Jane and Henry went up a hill...It also shows a list of the words that the class discovered that also start with the same sound as a student's name and that student's homework when children were asked to bring in items from home that started like their name.  The final activity includes a list of the children's names in the class where the children have counted/ clapped the syllables that they can hear in each name. 

 

The standard-based bulletin board below focuses on the drawings and words that are the final activity of "Star Names". After the children have done many acitivites that emphasize the beginning sound of the name of a single star student for the day, each child is asked to draw a picture of the star student. The teacher models the child's name as the class follows and then draws a picture of the student. The students begin with simple pictures and then more elaborate pictures that begin to fill up the white space and then finally stories about the student. As the drawings become more sophisticated, so do the words, beginning with the child's name and then moving to labels, sentences and then stories. This bulletin board displays the many levels of entering kindergartners, from a simple, almost unidentifiable picture with mock letters and scribbles to a sophisticated drawing with a phonetic sentence.

Mrs. Mallon and Mrs. Dillard's bulletin board focuses on the beginning stories that our youngest authors write in Writers' Workshop, showing four different levels of writing from simple drawings to  detailed drawings with simple phonetic sentences. What makes this board interesting is the way that the teachers introduce writing to their class by telling the students to first imagine a story with a beginning, middle, and end over three pages before they begin writing and then to tell their stories through drawings and words. It is amazing what these youngest writers have to say and what they can already write!

 

Each of the bulletin boards above provides a window into the important instruction that goes on inside kindergarten classrooms so early in the school year.  Can't wait to see how these boards unfold in the months to come.

Mother Goose is on the Loose!

It's time again for teachers to put up new standard-based bulletin boards. The Mall-ard Kindergarten Team  have used their imagination and humor to showcase the work they do around Nursery Rhymes. The Nursery Rhyme unit was written at Chets Creek with the goal of providing more phonological awareness activities early in a child's school career using familiar words. Supporting resources can be found at the Chets Creek Kindergarten wiki.

Rhyming - Children practice rhyming many words early during this unit. They rhyme the words in the poems. They think of other words that rhyme with words in the poem. They can be seen playing Rhyming Bingo and Rhyming Lotto, matching puzzle picture couplets that rhyme, sorting pictures into rhyming groups and singing songs with rhyming words. As demonstrated on the left, children can be assessed by giving them a word and having them draw pictures of words that rhyme with the given picture.

Clapping Syllables - The Mall-ards show other work of students on this bulletin board around phonological awareness such as an assessment of the children showing that they can identify the number of syllables in a word. The children have done this activity using a variety of words many times orally. They have clapped their names and their classmates' names. They have clapped and sorted pictures as a group into the number of syllables for each word.

Beginning Phoneme Identity- In this activity children practice writing their name by putting it into a rhyme and then thinking of another word or picture that begins with the same sound as their name. There is nothing as powerful as using a child's own name!

Vocabulary - Because the words from the rhyme are used for many of the phonological activities, it is important that the student knows what each word means. We want words to have meaning from the very beginning and not be just a group of sounds that have no meaning. This activity of drawing some of the words in the rhyme especially supports our second language learners who may not be as familiar with these traditional American rhymes. As the teacher makes sure students know the words, she is also teaching the child one-to-one correspondence as she encourages each child to put one finger under one word as she says the poem to figure out what the word is that is to be drawn. The teacher reinforces looking at the first sound to help figure out the word - all reading strategies that are being taught simultaneously in Readers' Workshop.
Beginning, Middle, End and Sequencing - At the same time that students are learning about the beginning, middle and end of stories in more complex "Star Books" during Readers' Workshop, the students are practicing this same skill in a simpler way during Skills Block. Many of the Nursery Rhymes are actually short stories and by sequencing the events of the story and drawing the beginning, middle and end of these very short stories, the children are practicing the same skill that we will be asking of them in Readers' Workshop. We are asking them to identify the beginning of the story with its characters and setting. We are asking them to retell the middle of the story, identify the problem and then to remember the events in order. Finally we ask our children to retell the end of the story by explaining the solution to the problem. Because the Nursery rhyme is short and simple, it is easy for the teacher to use the rhyme to reinforce these retelling strategies and also the reading strategies that she is teaching such as using your finger to point to each word, using the first letter of a word to help you guess the word, and looking at the pictures. It is while reading nursery rhymes, which are in the child's independent reading bag and are going home each night as a book-in-the-bag, that most children begin to believe that they are really readers!

The Mall-ard Team is also known for its humor so no board would be complete without something that just makes you laugh out loud. This month that little something extra is pictures or Mrs. Mallon and Mrs. Dillard dressed up like little black sheep. No adult or child can look at those adorable pictures without knowing that this is a team where children laugh every day and simply enjoy the thrill of learning.

Jack and Jill

As part of our Skills Block we put a priority on phonemic awareness in these early days of Kindergarten. To bring phonemic awareness alive, I wrote a Nursery Rhyme Unit several years ago.  It includes nursery rhyme activities, and suggests teaching a rhyme a week, but uses the words from the rhymes to practice phonemic awareness. For instance, this week while we are learning the Jack and Jill nursery rhyme,

• the students are blending words from the rhyme (/J/ /ack/ Jack, /w/ /ent/ went, /h/ /ill/ hill), 
• identifying the first sound that they hear (What is the first sound you hear in Jack? /J/ What is the first sound in fetch? /f/), 
• What other words rhyme with hill? (Jill, grill, thrill...) 
• What are the rhyming words in the nursery rhyme? (hill-Jill, down-crown). 

So the meat of the lesson in phonemic awarenes is in between the comprehension of the nursery rhyme. To comprehend this rhyme we act it out, use motions to sing it to a tune, draw the rhyme's beginning, middle and end, draw pictures of all the nouns in the rhyme, etc.