Kindergarten Language Arts

The most important thing about all areas of our curriculum: fun, fun, fun!!!!!! I had one of my former Kindergartners (who was reading and writing independently and way above grade level in June) tell his mom he was a little nervous about first grade. He said, "In kindergarten we didn't learn anything. We just had lots of fun." The best learning happens when you least expect it.

In our Kindergarten class I use both a letter of the week as well as a thematic approach to Language Arts. Although I do focus on one letter each work, all of the letters are incorporated to our daily activities and in to all areas of our curriculum. I use many types of activities to teach phonics and language arts skills. Below are a few of the activities we do on a regular basis. All of these activities help us develop phonics skills and a strong sense of our language. Many of the children are reading short words and sentences by the end of the year and writing independently. The children that aren't reading will have a firm foundation of their letter sounds and will have phonemic awareness skills necessary to begin reading in first grade.

Journal writing: We write in our journal each morning. In September we start out with pictures and dictation (the teacher's write the words), and out skills gradually improve. Soon we are making lists, copying words, and doing shared writing with the teachers.. By June most children are writing sentences in their journals using sight words, phonetic spelling, and their dictionaries.

Relaxing on the floor with a journal page, and looking things up in our dictionaries.

Here is a closeup of our dicionary - each child has his/her own... if there is a word a child would like us to spell, we will only spell it if we can write it in his/her dictionary (on the tabbed page) for later reference. The page below (with the letter Aa) has pictures and words on it (it's difficult to see) There is one page for each letter.

Daily News: We do a daily newspaper each day. Three of the children get to share news that has happened to them during the week. I write down the news on a chart paper, but explain what I am writing and have the children help me as I write. I uses pictures to represent some words, and also underline our sight words. This enables the children to go back and reread the daily newspapers. At the end of the news, I do a mini lesson on one topic (spacing, capitals, syllables, beginning consonants, sentence length, or word length). This is one of our favorite activities.

Books: We use many books in our classroom. We read both fiction and non-fiction books, and we love to make our own books. We make big books, mini books, class books, innovations on our favorite stories, and many repetitive text books. From the beginning of Kindergarten we believe we are "readers", and I really try to instill a love of literature. Many of the books we make we take home and put in our "book boxes". Others stay at school or travel home in a "traveling bag" that we take turns sharing with our families.

Big books, tapes stories, and fiction or non fiction books are just a few of the books we use!

Games: We play many games in our classroom. Bingo, Memory, Pictionary, and Wheel of fortune are just a few of the games we use to reinforce our language arts skills. We play several games each week, and the children are always disappointed if we aren't' playing a game during language arts time. We work on skills such as letter recognition, beginning or ending consonants, rhyming, and eventually reading short words.

The boys play a matching game, and we play Wheel of Fortune with Miss Shaynee

A Halloween letter game and practicing the sight words "in" and "out" with a spider game

Songs: Each day we sing a language arts song. These songs allow us to manipulate language by substituting beginning consonants (Bippity boo ba, bippity bay, my oh my what a wonderful day...) or vowels (I like to eeeet, eeet, eeet, eeples and beeneeenees), rhyming (willably wallaby wuzy, an elephant sat on Suzy), learning about a concept (a e i o u - these are the vowels of the alphabet), or just having fun (with ABC rock).

Mail: In January I introduce a Kindergarten mailbox. We do a few small group lessons on how to write mail (using to and from, and making sure their is a name on the outside of the envelope). For the rest of the school year, the children take turns being the mail person. They deliver the mail to our class that the children have written throughout the morning. I encourage the children to write back to one anther, and the teachers write back to any children that have written as well. We make one or two walking trips to the real mailbox, and we share the letters we receive from relatives with our class. The mailbox is always a big hit, and it is usually full all the way through graduation in June.

Writing (and receiving) mail is one of our favorite things to do!

Here are some other fun language arts activities

We love to stamp our names, but we REALLY loved writing our names with ABC cookies.... we also played name bingo with our cookie names, and got to eat the letters that were called - yummmy!

As you can see from the above activities, all of our language arts lessons are fun and meaningful to the children. We try to incorporate language arts skills into all areas of our curriculum, and we also try to use a variety of mediums to write and form letters with (pens, pencils, dry erase markers, on white boards vis a vis markers on the overhead, chalk, wikki sticks, licorice, links, etc., etc.). My goal in language arts is to instill a love of language and literature, and encourage children to want to read and write!!

To request a complete information packet, or to set up an appointment to meet with Miss Shaynee, please email the Academy or call us at 650-591-4882. You are also invited to attend our Back to School and Kindergarten Information Evening held each September.