Literacy Stations and a Freebie!

Our literacy stations have been going well. The majority of the class has been working very hard. I decided to give the students a grade on their literacy station work. Every station has a worksheet that supports the learning goal. The students keep a folder with all of the worksheets. At the end of the week, I collect folders and grade the worksheets. We use the one, two, and three star grading scale that was established during a past writing lesson.

I need to make a point of posting our literacy stations at the start of the week rather than the end, but here are some of the stations the class used this week:

Jolly Snowmen Word Families: The students sorted the cards into word families and wrote their word families on a sheet. Then they had to choose two different words from the cards and write a sentence for each word. Thank you to Mrs. Phillips for these awesome snowmen cards!

 

Build a word: The students had to tap out the sounds in each word and find the cubes to build the word on each card. 

 Write the Room: The students loved the fancy glasses I picked up at Party City! They wore the glasses to help them look for T words.

 Rainbow Writing (& a freebie!): I made cards with the third quarter report card sight words for the students to use for rainbow writing. They thought it was cool to circle each word with rainbow colors after they wrote all of the sight words. Please use the rainbow writing freebie in your classroom!

Snowy Day Sort: The students had to cut, sort, and paste activities. They had to determine if the activities are done on snowy days or not. This activity came from a packet from Mrs. Bremer's blog. We will do more of the activities next week!

Since we have been reading about different kinds of weather, I created a list writing station for the students. They looked at cards with pictures of different kinds of clothes and had to write the name of the clothing in the appropriate list.  (Last week we worked on writing lists during the writing lessons.) Here are the clothing cards and chart.

Three Star Story

My school teaches 6-Trait Writing. I use the Launching the Writer's Workshop book to teach the six traits. Recently, my class came up with what makes a three star story. They decided that a three star story has details in the words and pictures, cupcake words (that's what we call our sight words!) are spelled correctly, and sentences have capital letters and end marks. We discussed what makes a two star and one star story, too. The kinders were excited to try to get three star stories when writing our class book, A Snowman Should Not.... The great writing prompt came from Mrs. Jump's Sneezy the Snowman Unit.  Here are a few pages from our book.

The class LOVES to read the class book in our classroom library during center time!

Snowmen

It finally snowed! The kinders were very excited coming into school this morning with snow on the ground. Even though we have had a pretty mild winter up until this point, we have been doing a lot of snowman activities, thanks to Mrs. Jump's Class Blog.

The students used a spinner and graphed the results to determine what their snowman would look like.  They had fun and rooted for their favorite hat and weather condition.

Some snowmen were melted and others had nice snowballs. The students used their creativity to make the faces.

We read Sneezy the Snowman by Maureen Wright and did several writing activities about poor  Sneezy.

This week we talked about what makes a three star story. The students decided that a paper deserves three stars if it has a lot of details in the sentences and drawings. I was very proud of how well they completed the Sneezy the Snowman bad choices story map. 

We did not get to all of the activities in Mrs. Jump's snowman unit, so more snowman activities are to come!