January Writing Prompts and a Freebie!

Writing in kindergarten is always so much fun to teach.  It is amazing to see how students are able to develop through the year and gain so much more confidence as writers.  I often see students who in August, cannot even write their name, and by June are writing full stories with 4-5 sentences.  Scaffolding your students learning is important to help them reach their fullest potential.  We are able to do this through modeling, sharing the pen with your students and giving them independence to write on their own.  

It is important to help students reach their fullest potential. You can do this in your classroom by providing students  with different opportunities to write.  Students can write words, lists, stories and more!

Write the room activities  are great for the classroom.  They give students the opportunity to increase their vocabulary and is a fun way for students to interact with the new words.  

We move from words to sentences.  This provides the opportunity for students to help develop their writing skills, by using sight words and focus on correct spacing, capitalization and punctuation.  

Error analysis is a great activity in any classroom.  For this activity, students find and correct errors in sentences.  I focus on common errors students may be making in their writing.

To reinforce using sight words, I love using sentence starters.  I provide students the beginning of a sentence, they finish it and draw a picture to match.

 In addition to having students choose what they want to write about during a writing block, I also love giving students writing prompts.  I support their writing by labeling pictures, to help students gain more confidence as writers and eliminate the "how do I spell...."  This helps to get students writing creatively and encourage them as writers.

Writing also teaches students to have a voice.  From opinion writing to writing that has meaning, students are able to tell us something by their writing.  

 

Students can share their New Year goals for both home and school with this new years resolution writing activity (a link to this freebie is included at the end of the post)

All of these resources work perfect to get you through the month of January and provide your students many different opportunities to develop as writers.  They work great for literacy centers, as homework, or can easily be left for a sub.  You can find all of these activities and more in my January Writing Prompts and Activities

 You can also find the New Year Goals Freebie here:

Thank you for stopping by and I hope you found some helpful ways to encourage your early writers.

Pre-K Learning Goals

Assessing and documenting students learning in pre-k is such an important task.  It is important for students to know what they are learning and what is expected of them. This can be done, even at such a young age but it has to be relevant and exciting to them.

In my classroom, I developed a goals chart to track students progress.  It is a simple 1-page goal chart of skills that many pre-k students master.  

I always like to keep these in take home folders as a great way to communicate with parents.  They also work well in a data folder for students, or I have some teachers display them in the classroom.  

Throughout the year as I assess students and they master a goal, they color that box on this tracking sheet.  

Most skills that can be assessed also include a tracking form. (These letter name and letter sound tracking forms are included as a freebie at the end of this post)  To use these, I sit with the student one on one to assess them.  I use a different color pen each time I assess and circle the letters that a student is able to identify.  I date it in the corner of that page with that color pen so when I look back at the paper or share it, I know the pace at which the individual student is learning that concept.  

Many of these forms also come with large cards that you can use to administer these assessments.

If you chose to do data notebooks in your classroom or need documentation, these tracking tools work perfectly.  You can simply print and bind and you have a resource that is perfect to share with students, parents at parents teacher conferences or as a data tracking resource.  It includes tracking forms for many of the skills assessed, making it easy for teacher to administer and parents to understand what mastery looks like. 

You can find all of this included in my pre-k goals packet here:

You can also find the free letter names and sound assessment here :

This assessment is great to administer at the beginning of the year and send home to parents as well!

I hope that you and your students enjoy using these resources in your classroom and you have a great beginning of the school year.  

Kindergarten Behavior Expectations and Think Sheet

Teaching behavior expectations in kindergarten is important, especially in the first few weeks of school.  This often sets the stage for your class for the entire year.  For students to fully understand what is expected of them, it is important that teachers address and teach these expectation. 

I usually spend a lot of time during the first weeks of school teaching student expectations and classroom behaviors. We complete sorts of good choices and bad choices in the classroom and discuss what makes them good and bad choices.

We complete these sorts whole group and students also complete individual behavior reflection sheets.  These work great during the first few weeks of school or when students may need a review.  

These include different levels of difficulty beginning with students simply deciding if an actions is a good or bad choice, to a student sort of good and bad choices (this is a freebie at the end of the blog post) to finally illustrating or writing good or bad choices.
Also we color an emergent reader reviewing some of the classroom expectations.

These can also just be used as little coloring pages when a classroom expectation is introduced. 
In your classroom, you may want to challenge your students to focus on a certain expectation for a week.  Included are posters that would work great for this:

              

These provide a visual and focus for students when expectations are being taught.  You can make it a game and provide an incentive if students can meet this expectation a certain amount of times in a week.

Once these expectations are taught it is important to keep students accountable to their actions.  I have been using a visual think sheet in my classroom that is perfect for this.  It is very appropriate for your early learners in pre-k or kindergarten or special ed because it includes pictures for students to show what they did.    Students simply color in the choice they made and a better choice they can make.

These are great reflections for students, communication for parents and documentation if necessary.

You may also want to post these cool down methods where students can reflect on strategies to cool down, instead of getting upset.

You can find this entire Behavior Think Sheets and Activities in my TPT store

and the Free Good and Bad Choices Student Sort here:

Spring Geoboard

As the weather gets nicer outside and summer approaches, as teachers we have to keep our students engaged and excited about their learning. We all know that our students love hands on-activities and these geoboard activities are perfect for a math or literacy center to provide your students with meaningful and exciting activities.  

If you don't have geoboards for your classroom yet, you can find the set that I used here:
Geoboards (affiliate link)

These geoboard activities are simple, yet challenge your students by allowing them to construct pictures out of shapes and identify the shapes they find.  They are perfect for tactile learners and will challenge students to extend their thinking.  

We have been having so much fun working with spring geoboard pictures (these are all free at the end of the post) .  Your students will love creating these spring themed pictures on geoboards.

Included are two different levels of pictures, an easier and a more difficult, a great way to differentiate for students. 

Once they create the picture, on their recording sheet they can then label the picture (a great way to tie in literacy) and identify the shapes they found in their picture.  This is a great way to extend their thinking about shapes.    

Included are 10 different pictures for students to create, each with 2 different levels of difficulty.

If your students enjoy these, I also have geoboard sets available for all holidays and all seasons as a bundle that you can grab at discount price.  

Your students will love the hands on aspect of them and great to rotate themes throughout the year as a math or literacy center.Each set contains both small cards and large cards with 10 different pictures and 2 different levels for each picture.  

You can grab the spring pictures as a freebie here.  

I hope that you and your students enjoy this freebie and you have a great end of your school year!

Sight Word Pattern Blocks

My students love pattern blocks but I never feel that I get enough use of them.  They are perfect for math but I felt we should be getting more use out of them in our classroom since my students love them so much.  They provide hands on learning  and students love building and exploring using pattern blocks.  To build on my students desire for more hands on learning activities in the classroom we recently began working on building words using our pattern blocks during literacy centers.  

They are perfect for tactile learners since students are actually building the words while using  higher level critical thinking skills by creating each of the words.  Since the words end up being so large, they are not to scale and students need plenty of space to complete them but your students will be engaged and excited to complete this activity.  They work great as an extension activity, especially at the end of the year when students may be able to read all sight words but may need more practice spelling them.  

You can find the color words as a freebie in TPT store (there is a link at the end of the post).

I also have 100 + different sight words available that are a great way to reinforce kindergarten sight words.

Also provided is a recording sheet that hold students accountable to their work and also ties in math and literacy in this activity.  .  

You can find the free color word pattern blocks here:

I hope that you and your students enjoy this activity and have fun learning using pattern blocks!