Research in Kindergarten, Part 3

After we did our research it was time to write. I put the kids in groups so that it would be easier to help them and they would be able to help each other. I put the kids in 3 groups, introduction page, animal page and places page. We first worked on drawing our pictures.

In our class this year we have talked a lot about illustration and how they help tell the story. I LOVE Katie Wood Ray's book In Pictures, In Words. It really talks about how young writers carry a message in their illustrations and helping them understand that they are telling a story through thier illustratons. I think as the year as progressed that they were able to write more detailed writing, because they had started the year thinking about how to add details to thier pictures.
 

Anyways...they began with working on pictures with labels. We have talked about how we can not take anything from our schema file, but rather everything needs to come from our book. So we put all of our research and books on the carpet at the front of the room, so when kids needed to, they were able to go back and look at the research. After creating the picture, outlining it in black marker, and coloring we were ready to move onto writing.

They were still in thier groups. Again this helped with management and they were able to help each other. The group that was working on introduction is the group that tends to struggle. They were able to get a lot more support and one on one attention, by putting them all together. We talked about how we start our sentences and writing simple sight words. The other groups were pretty much able to do this independently. We talked about expanding our sentences and how we could make them more interesting. ( RL.K.1f)

After each group was done with writing thier page,w e put all the pages together and began to produce our writing using digital tools (W.K.6).

Research in Kindergarten Part 2

After we signed up for research, we got into our groups and I assigned a person in charge of the book. Then they looked through their book and talked to each other about it. Then we came back together as a group and I modeled how to work on research using animals from Europe. We found animals in our book and drew a picture and labeled it. Then I assigned them a job either the writer or the illustrator. And they began...After working in their groups, we came back together and shared out what we learned with everyone else.

Research in Kindergarten

We are finishing our study of the world this week. We have learned about all the different continents and read several fiction stories about these different continents. We began our research by talking about what research is and how grown ups do research all the time. They look in books to find information and they don't write using information just in their head. We then signed up for what continent we wanted to learn about.

Around the World in Kindergarten

We are continuing to work on our new unit about the continents. It is a steady battle of teaching the standards or teaching the unit. This one is engaging to the kids by having them gain schema through the use of nonfiction text on the continent and the fiction stories involving the continent.
We activated prior knowledge (APK) through brainpop jr. by watching the video on continents and oceans then we read a book/atlas on Europe. This was part of the N part of the GANAG model (new knowledge). While we read this book, they took notes (another high yield strategy), either by drawing pictures or taking notes with words. The first one I am very proud of... this student came to my classroom knowing nothing and really struggled with the social dynamics of a classroom. Just look at all those sounds he was able to get down as well as the concept of details in a nonfiction text. The next one is from a higher student who is able to take those notes as well as make a judgment about what place she would like to visit.

Pooh

One would think that Winnie the Pooh would be an easy, sweet story to read to kindergarteners....well it is such a hard one instead. The story switches characters, narrators, and is very vocabulary rich. We used several different chapters to practice asking questions, vocabulary, and story elements. At the beginning we rated ourselves. This corresponds nicely to One Teacher At A Time...by rating ourselves to the objective. I remind myself constantly that these babies are 5 and 6 years old. Sometimes they surprise me greatly by thinking and doing things that you wouldn't expect from kids this young, but then that sets me up to expecting me to think that they will act differently than other 5 and 6 years old.... But overall they seemed to get it... even kids who struggle where able to comprehend this very difficult text.