This was our first full week of Kindergarten and our focus was names! I want all of the students to know each other (and their own!) names well so I decided to start the year by focusing on names. We started our "special helper" routine. Each day I announce the special helper and this person is the line leader, calendar helper, the first to pick a centre etc. He/she is also the quiet police when we get ready for home. Since we have to be in the hall to get ready the special helper walks up and down the hall (I get the students to sit on the wall when they are ready) and when we are all ready announces 3 quiet friends. These 3 people get a sticker. It has been working like a charm so far! We also started our name of the day routines. I learned about this on Elizabeth's blog Kickin' It In Kindergarten. Click here to see her post on it. I modified the chart and laminated it so that I could reuse it everyday. Although if I was to do this again next year I would remake the chart so that everything was singular. That way I could add the s only where necessary! To learn the difference between vowels and consonants we first watched the video "Vowel Bat"... and I also put these vowel glue bottles from The Teacher Wife on the whiteboard. After we count the letters, vowels and consonants we clap how many syllables are in the name. Then I call the special helper up and they sit in a chair by the chart stand. I ask them the three questions (What is your favourite colour? What is your favourite food? How many sisters/brothers do you have?) and we fill in the chart together. During small group time the SK's worked on this "A my name is Alice" craft from "Names Math & Literacy Fun" by Deanna Jump. Here is my example that the kids looked at as they made theirs. And the JK's worked on their Rainbow Name Mosaiacs (also from the same unit). I put the finished products up above our bag hooks! (The rainbow names are blurred because they are names) We introduced a few new centres. This one is Drivin' Down Letter Lane. It is in Tara West's "Teacher's Taking Back Their Weekends Aug/Sept Edition". This one was also very popular! The students are told to read the number on the apple and put that many pom poms on the tree with the paper clips. Although these wooden paper clips are not very strong and we had many broken ones by the end of the week... I went to the dollar store and bought plastic ones today so hopefully those will be a little sturdier! This "Apple Pickin'" centre is also from Tara West's "Teacher's Taking Back Their Weekends Aug/Sept Edition". You can also see our name playdough mats. These are a freebie by Tara West (again! I love her stuff!) I have been using it with playdough, wikki sticks and whiteboard markers! Click here to download it from her TpT store. We also put out the alphabet lacing and the students worked on letter recognition and fine motor skills. For math we worked on identifying and ordering numbers to 10. First we read and acted out "10 Sleepy Dinosarus". 10 students were given number headbands 1 - 10 (I just made them out of sentence strips and wrote the numbers on them). I also set up 10 chairs. We read the story and as they heard their number they went and sat in the correct chair. Next time I will make number necklaces instead of headbands. The headbands did not fit on their heads well and it was hard for them to remember what number they were. Last year I did them with necklaces (number cards on yarn) and it worked much better! The ebook for "10 Sleepy Dinosarus" can be found here. On Friday we listend to and learned the numeral song. The song can be found on YouTube. Click here for the song. After we listened to the song we practiced singing it and making numbers in the air. We sing the first line 3 times like the YouTube video. Last year one of my SK's really benefited from learning this song so I'm hoping it will help with the kids this year as well! I'm putting it up on my math wall so that I can remind them to use this resource during our math centre time. The lyrics for 10 is hard to see (sorry!) but it says "Come right down and make a zero, to make the number 10!) We also reviewed our fire drill and lock down procedures as it is Safety Week in our district next week. Next week we will be working on sorting for math and colours for literacy!