Finally Friday!

I woke up this morning and had NO voice.  Literally.  I left our bedroom to get some medicine and when my hubby called to ask if I was already leaving, I couldn't answer!  Luckily after some Mucinex and tons of cough drops, my voice seems pretty much back to normal.  Teaching was rough today but luckily I have some understanding kiddos!

I think I've mentioned on here before that I'm doing some after school tutoring with K/1 friends.  It's been tricky for me to find activities that will work for all the kiddos when we only have an hour each week!  I decided to focus on sight words and fluency because it seems like that would be beneficial for all of the students.  I found a great site with free printable sight word "keep" books.  The site also has a ton of other great resources for Kindergarten!  Check it out if you haven't before: http://www.hubbardscupboard.org/index.html

I tutor in our school media center so I have to take all of my materials with me (difficult)!  I made a mini word wall that I can easily transport.  I made the word wall on my computer and had it blown up to poster size at Staples.  It's laminated so I can write on it with dry erase markers or vis-a-vis if I want.  I also decided to create student word "walls" that the students can fill in each week and take with them at the end of our tutoring so they have a word wall at home.  Here are some pictures....

One of my reading groups has been working on noticing patterns within different books.  They were having some difficulty so I decided to have them compare and contrast two books by the same author.  We started out with two similar books so it wouldn't be too frustrating.  Here is our finished product:

I can't remember if I've talked about our Reader Ratings board or not.  Every week, we have a new read aloud and the students get to vote whether or not they would recommend the book to their friends.  I do sets of 4 books and each "set" focuses on one author.  So far, we've read books by David Shannon, Jack Prelutsky, James Marshall, and Mark Teague.  Our next author is Steven Kroll.  We discuss the author's writing style and the author's voice in the books.  The kids love to vote!  I modified this idea from a website created by Mrs. Newingham and Mrs. Gordon.  They have a ton of great ideas for your classroom!