Classroom Dojo

A co-worker recently introduced me to this free behavior tracking app and I love it! Classroom Dojo is a visual behavior tool that allows you to easily track positive as well as negative student behaviors through a point system. Sound like a lot of work? It really isn't. Once you type in all your students' names, Class Dojo assigns a colorful character button to each name. As students exhibit behaviors tap their name once to bring up a menu of behavior options. Tap the behavior they just exhibited and a point will be awarded or deducted from their daily total. Behaviors are tracked daily and can be archived for the entire school year. Parents, other teachers, and administrators can be emailed with a daily graph detailing the percentage of each type of behavior exhibited by a single student each day. Go to their online site to customize the type of behaviors you are specifically tracking. You will also find helpful tutorials to get  you and your students started on this journey together! (Just make sure your school tech administrator has unblocked the site from any filtering services your district may implement prior to classroom use). 

Happy Wednesday!

Anticipating St. Patrick's Day!

I was surprised that only one out of my 11 Kindergartners seemed to have a clue what Saint Patrick's Day was about. I wanted to get their imaginations revved up quickly to celebrate this holiday since we only have about a week before our classroom celebration. I decided to appeal to my students' love of sensory input (and wet paint in general) by having them create shamrocks with their fists. I told them to make the letter "a" in sign language, then lay their fist down flat into the plate of paint. I guided their hands to the correctly rotated position so the leaves would fan out. Then, students took a paint brush in their clean hand and made a quick swoosh down and over for the stem. I enjoyed seeing the looks on their faces as their fists dripped green paint! It was priceless! 

The next morning, I had them cut out their dry shamrocks (having previously traced around them in highlighter as a visual guide for their scissors). Each shamrock turned out unique to the individual. We hung each one onto a bulletin board by the door. Every morning so far, at least one of them comes in and admires their work wondering what exactly we are going to learn next week about St. "Paddick's" Day as one of my kiddos says. I just love seeing their excitement grow!

Happy Friday!

Connecting Sounds Through Signs

Today's classroom is an intriguing mixture of abilities, learning preferences, sensory needs, and communication styles. At this time of the school year, it can be hard to get such a diversity of students continuously excited about isolating the beginning, middle and end sounds in words. How can I continue to meet all the unique needs of my students while teaching an often ho-hum (although vital) foundational skill? 

In our class, we have taken turns, chorused together, shouted, whispered, and squawked our answers to phonemic isolation questions. We have written our answers on whiteboards as well as in the air with our finger. We have even answered by sliding our fingers through piles of shaving cream on our desks. But still, questions such as, "What is the beginning sound in jet?" or "What is the middle sound in sun?" have produced decreasing amounts of enthusiasm from my learners. 

So, I was excited to discover (quite by accident) that my Kinders are once again eager to isolate phonemes when they can connect the sound with the corresponding letter from the American Sign Language alphabet. The kids think it is great fun to be able to communicate with their hands and no speech. Several of them seemed mystified by the idea that hands could convey so much in place of the spoken word. Thus, we are happily addressing various learning, sensory, and communication needs while simultaneously hitting key Kindergarten learning goals ~ including exploring the diverse populations around us. Woohoo! I am glad this learning train is picking up the speed it needs to make it to the end of this year.

Happy Monday!

P.S. When first introducing this skill, I would focus on isolating only 2 sounds at a time. For example, teach students how to make the c and d signs then sharing only words with that initial phoneme. My students have now built up such a repertoire of sign letters that I can generally present words with 4 or 5 different phonemes at a time. 

Free I Can Statements for the Common Core!

My principal totally and completely made my day when she forwarded this wonderful link containing all the K-5 Common Core standards translated into child-friendly I Can statements. I had pinned several I Can statement ideas on Pinterest, but had not yet found the time to make my own. I had also found some links to sets available for purchase, but I am a cheap skate and always try to make my own resources whenever possible. Now I don't have to. They are all here in a wonderful checklist format for free! You can print them by grade level and content area. There are two versions - the first plain black and white; the second with color and graphics. (I bet you can guess which one I printed!) The font is a bit small so I plan to have an older student helper type them into a larger format for my daily bulletin board. This checklist makes a great readiness assessment tool as well. 

Happy Tuesday!

Technology, Writing, & Kindergartners

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One of the biggest shocks for me in moving to Kindergarten this year is the fact that my itty bitty students are supposed to not only learn to produce quite sophisticated written works by the end of the year, complete with planning webs and rough drafts (the whole nine yards that I do not recall doing until I was at least in the second grade), but they are also supposed to use various technology to produce and publish their written pieces as well. They can't even type yet! Aaaaahhh!
                                                                  Or so I thought at first.

Overhead projector to the rescue! 
Turns out my kiddos love to do shared writing activities on the computer as long as they can "spy" on what each other writes. Rather than always using a big, ol' piece of blank chart paper to do our weekly interactive and shared writing activities, I now type the shared sentence and project it onto our whiteboard. Then, I have each student come up to type their own word or words into the sentence blank(s). For example, this coming week we will be focusing on the study of weather. The sentence frame will be "Today, I wish the weather was ________." The students can take turns typing in the weather option of their choice. 

I recently expanded the idea to include writing emails for various purposes - thank you's, requests, etc... My classroom website has a blank email forum for my parents to use, but then I thought, why not have my students use it, too? They get a kick out of typing a shared letter to me or to other people in our building. Emails can zoom from our class to anyone in the building - custodians, cooks, other teachers, and even the principal! The kids absolutely love it when one of their email recipients sends a return message or mentions a note when they see my kids in the hall. 

So, what I had originally dreaded and feared in the realm of Kindergarten, technology, and writing has ended up becoming one of the highlights of my week! Go figure.

Happy Wednesday!