kindergarten

A lot has happened since my last posts.  I’ve been student teaching in a wonderful kindergarten classroom that I’m very proud to be a part of.  I was nervous leaving fourth grade because I loved it so much that I feared I wouldn’t like kindergarten but — surprisingly I love teaching kindergarten.  So this May I will be graduating with experience in every grade I’m certified in, except for sixth grade (but I have a lot of experience working with sixth graders when proctoring tests for The Princeton Review, my part time job).

I’m currently in charge of a mini social studies unit on community entitled “My Neighborhood” and a mini math unit on Time.  At first when I was told I was going to be teaching five year olds how to tell time I was in shock!  I remember learning it in first grade and being so confused that I didn’t really grasp the concept until second grade because everyone is so used to digital clocks.  So when I taught the students this past Thursday, I was, and am still, glowing with delight that they really got the concept of how to read an analog clock.  I wish I had taken pictures, but when you are teaching in the moment it’s hard to do.  I feel so proud of all 20 kindergarten students, and myself.  On Friday their morning work was putting together a clock on their own and every single student got it right and the time  that the clock was pointing to.

In social studies, I created the first lesson about homes.  We read a cute spin-off of The Three Little Pigs called, The Three Pigs and the students loved it!  They were engaged during the entire sitting.  Then, instead of having them sit back at their desks and do a hand out or something along those lines, I created different centers that they went to that correlated to homes and the story we had just read.  At one, the students were asked to be construction workers and they had to work together as a group to create one house made of sticks.  This was a difficult task to do but they put their name on their construction hats and went to work and some came out looking quite good.  In another center students built a house with wooden blocks for their brick home.  This was a much easier task and students built inventive architectual designs.  At another center students played a board game I created.  Students rolled the dice and prayed they didn’t land on the big bad wolf or they would have to go all the way back to start.  The first to the houses wins!  But if the big bad wolf wins the game all the little pig’s houses blow down.  And lastly, at another center students were given cards that they had to match in a memory game.

On Friday I created I taught a second lesson in my community unit.  I had brought in a picture book the students had already read (although I did not know), so we skimmed the pictures and talked about what a neighborhood is.  Then, I read My Map Book which is a very cute story and students got to see what different kinds of maps look like.  One student in the class is obsessed with creating maps and wants to be a map maker when he grows up.

Monday I have my first supervised lesson in kindergarten on measurement.  Wish me luck!