Word Work station

Happy Saturday Ya'll!! Only one week of school left... and it's a biggie for me. I'm working on my masters and I have to wrap up an action research project enough to write a final paper, however it's a project that we are still working on at my school. Yikes! And this week is behavior reward party, class Christmas parties and the Polar Express!!

This year my kinders are very young and many of the things I wanted to do this fall just haven't worked for them. It took a break down moment this week to finally get some help from the instructional coaches. I think they didn't believe that I really need help since they both have been in my room a number of times. Here is what they learned (I already knew it)... my kinders have NO independence what so ever! I've been begging for them to come and see what I was working with... and understand why I keep saying "um we can't do that". Now don't hear that as we can't do lots of things, we can... and each day we are adding new skills! It's that some of our "district" goals just are unrealistic with this group of kinders. For example, the district wants us to know 100 sight words by the end of kindergarten. We have been teaching them in our district 2 words a week this fall and jumping to 4 or 5 in the spring. This isn't going to happen with these little ones. So now we are backing up the truck. Not exactly sure what that is going to look at but some of the things I tried this week ROCKED!!

First I took the sight words that we have been working on the longest and made them into a word work station. Here is what I did... I used the clip art from the WONDERFUL kpmdoodles to print large black and white images on colored paper.

Then I printed the sight words on white paper and cut the squares and glued them to the cut outs. And of course I laminated them ;) Then they look like this...

The kids get them in a word work station and practice writing each word 5 times. I am thinking about having the kids write on white boards some days and on paper other days. I am still working out our station rotation. Right now we are doing one station then a mini lesson, then a station, then a mini lesson. I am really hoping to get to a place where we can have 2 stations and then a mini lesson. I want to have 5 rotations a day were every child reads to self or someone, works with words, visits the writing station, works on critical thinking or fine motor skills and the computer. Not to mention I pull them for work too. Like I said we are getting there!! I hope to post some of the sight word files by the end of the weekend so everyone can use them!