The First Month of Kindergarten

I haven't written on here in a long time! The beginning of the school year was crazy. After three weeks of teacher orientation and kindergarten screenings I finally met my class at the end of August. I started on the first day with 19 students and not even a month later I'm already at 27! Many students have been coming as they arrive to the area or as late registrations for kindergarten. This has made keeping up with all the student labels a real challenge. Every time I seem to have the right number of name tags and cubby labels a new friend arrives! It has definitely taught all the students a lesson in including new friends and making them feel welcome though.

We have spent the past few weeks working a lot on routines and transitions between activities. The school I work in has a lot of these procedures in place across all the grades which helps keep some transitions running a bit smoother from grade to grade. Many of my students have never been to school before so transitioning and following directions is especially difficult. We have been following a lot of strategies from Doug Lemov's book Teach like a Champion. These have definitely helped in creating smooth transitions from activity to activity. This has also helped my classroom as the majority of my students do not speak English as their first language. They now have a better idea of what to expect and have been able to verbalize some of this in English!

We have just begun getting into some of the core academics in the last two weeks including letter and number recognition, characters, setting, sight words, the writing process and the scientific method. I'll be sure to write another blog post more on our academics in the next few weeks!