Happy winter break!! I hope that you’re on break, at least – I know some schools are going a few days into next week, which can’t be fun.
This week was a little crazy – not that I’d expect anything else for the last week of school before break! On Monday I was out for a district reading specialist training on the impact of oral language development on reading (I’ll blog more about that soon), and then much of the rest of the week was filled with giving assessments, trying to get students’ take home book bags ready (thank you, Reading A to Z!), getting coworkers’ gifts ready, and the usual holiday stuff! One highlight from the week was playing Spanish letter sounds and syllables Bingo with my kiddos:
Click on the picture for the original post with the free Bingo card downloads (they are in Spanish).
I totally forgot to take a picture of the bags I sent home with my kiddos. Oops! The first and second grade ones were nothing spectacular – just some Reading A to Z books and then a few of my escaleras de fluidez (fluency ladders) for some decoding and fluency practice.
I wasn’t 100% sure what I should send home with my Kindergarteners. When I taught Kindergarten as a classroom teacher, many of my kids were reading by now, so I sent home little books that they were already familiar with. I also sent home letter sound flashcards to practice, and some handwriting, too. However, the Kindergarten students I work with are very low, so I couldn’t send home books, and I wasn’t sure how much the parents would be able to support them with letter sound flashcards. So I ended up sending home just a two-page packet – the first page was a parent letter, and the second page was an alphabet chart that we use to practice a letter sounds chant everyday in intervention. The letter basically asked them to take their children to the library and read to them, and to practice the letter sounds a few times each day.
Because I wanted to give parents some support with the letter sound aspect, I decided to make a YouTube video of me doing the chant. Just for your amusement, you can see it if you click {here}. It’s really nothing special (and probably a little silly), but it will give you a sense of how easy it was to make. I gave a link and a QR code on the parent letter, and I also showed the kids the video during our last intervention group. They were super excited at the idea of being able to watch the video and practice the chant at home! It would be very easy to do something similar with English letter sounds, or to give instructions on a particular strategy you want your kids to use in math. All I did was use my phone to take the video, and then uploaded it directly from my phone to YouTube. My gmail account was already linked to YouTube.
Crossing my fingers that my kiddos will be practicing over break! Especially my Kinders – we only have half-day Kindergarten at my school, so we have to squeeze in as much learning as possible.
I was also busy this week finishing up and giving out coworker gifts and treat bags. Here’s a photo of some chocolate covered peanut butter Ritz sandwich treat bags:
One of my teaching assistants thought that they were professionally made. Ha! Ha! A professional chef I am not. But they are super easy and turned out looking nice, considering all I did was melt chocolate in the microwave and dip chilled Ritz peanut butter cracker sandwiches in them. I was also quite pleased with the cute bags from Target!
Well, that was my week – it was about as scattered as this blog post was. 🙂 I hope you had a wonderful week! Happy winter break (or almost winter break, depending on where you teach)!
Love the chant video!! Will send home too! Thank you!