A Peek at our Listening and Pocket Chart Centers

You may remember that we recently got our listening center FUNDED through donorschoose.org. It is one of the favorite centers in our room! Scholastic offers a Listening Library for each grade through their book orders and I have ordered the November and December libraries so far. They come with four books and the cd to go along with each book. DeeDee Wills created a reading response unit to go along with each month's library and they have been the perfect addition to my listening center! The books are typically between 5 and 8 minutes long and then my students have 8-10 minutes to complete their responses. We are loving them so far!

Check it out on TPT

 November books include: Bear Says Thanks by Karma Wilson, Prairie Chicken Little by Jackie Mims Hopkins, Turkey Claus by Wendi Silvano, and Snowmen at Work by Carolyn Buehner.

Check it out on TPT

 December books include: Snowman Magic by Katherine Tegen, A Pirate's Twelve Days of Christmas by Philip Yates, The Gingerbread Bear by Robert Dennis, and Polar Opposites by Erik Brooks

Here are two of my sweet boys reading/listening to Bear Says Thanks!

Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures of our pocket chart center in action. I've used several different units for this center but my favorite by FAR is Miss Kindergarten's Word Cards. I printed and cut all of the Fall cards and it was a huge hit! The vocab words each have a picture on the card, which helps my non-readers. There are also a bunch of sight words that allow my students to build sentences in the pocket chart. I love that they feel so successful when they can create and read sentences! I bought the winter cards last week and I can't wait to trade out the cards in our center box. My students are going to be beside themselves! 

Last month, I totally slacked off and didn't put any of the writing practice pages out, but I think most of my students are ready for that aspect of this center. I'll introduce it when we get back from break and I think they'll really enjoy that, as well! I'm pretty sure that I spend the majority of my income on Miss Kindergarten's products on TPT and it is totally worth it. I basically want to be her when I grow up...but in the meantime, I'll just use her amazing products with my kiddos!

Check it out on TPT

Check it out on TPT

I just love sharing all of our centers with you! I am not kidding when I say that centers are every single one of my students' favorite parts of Kindergarten. We follow the same schedule every day and they STILL start asking when we're doing centers as soon as the walk in the door! At least I know that they're learning and practicing skills while they're having fun. We may get the week off, but I'm still getting a lot of work done. It's a good thing I have the sweetest, most appreciative class ever ;) Enjoy your Tuesday, friends!

Busy Learning! Check Out Our Poetry Center

I am officially impressed with all of these Kindergarten bloggers. By the time I get home from work, I am exhausted! And the last thing I want to do is keep working! We're still here and still doing really great and exciting things in Kindergarten. It's so hard to find the time to get through everything that we need to do in a day, but we usually squeeze it all in. We even manage to have some fun sometimes (who am I kidding? Every minute is fun with 5 year olds!).

Our guided reading/center time is everyone's favorite time of the day! In my opinion, this is one of the most important times of our school day. I'm working with my students on their level in guided reading and they are practicing the skills that we've been working on independently in their centers.

My center rotation schedule looks SUPER complicated, but it makes perfect sense to me. My mentor teacher (who is super amazing, by the way) has been phenomenal at working with me on my center schedule. At this point, each student goes to 4 centers each day. One center is their guided reading with me, one center is seat work (which is easily differentiated), and the other two are instructional centers. I have a chart that looks like this for every day of the week. My excel spreadsheet for centers is sort of out of control ;)

Throughout the week, they rotate through 10 instructional centers. Our centers are poetry, word work, phonemic awareness, pocket chart, writing, math, Roll, Say, Keep, library, big books, and our listening center. Several of our centers (poetry, library, big books, writing, and Roll, Say, Keep) require zero prep time. We've already set up the procedures and expectations for each of these centers, so I don't have to get anything ready for them. They stay pretty much the same from week to week. Every few weeks, I make some new cards for Roll, Say, Keep, but that's it! I'll be back later this week to show you what we use for each of our centers, but today we're just going to take a peek at our poetry center. It's one of our newest centers to implement, but they are doing such a great job!

Poetry: I use Karen Jones' A to Z Poetry Notebooks. I am obsessed with it!

Check it out on TPT

I use the poem that goes along with our letter of the week for phonics. Last week, our focus letter was "S", so we used the S poem. I wrote out the poem on sentence strips and stuck it in the pocket chart to use as a warm up for shared reading each day.

My poetry center doesn't start until Wednesday so my students are familiar with the poem by the time they work in their notebooks. On Wednesday morning, we read the poem out of my poetry notebook and I walk them through all of the steps for the poetry center for that week. We've been doing this center for a few weeks, so they've pretty much gotten the hang of it. They work in groups of 2-3 for centers, so they know to ask each other if they need help and to not bother Miss Vick while I'm working with other groups!!

These are a few of their completed "M" pages from a few weeks ago. They blow me away with how quickly they catch on!

 This sweet one forgot to circle her sight words, but she did check the box! One step at a time ;)

We're still a little bit confused about how sometimes our sight words are part of another word, but that means it's NOT our sight word. Notice how this student circled "on" in the word "monkeys". It's hard!

So that's how our poetry center rolls these days. They are doing a great job with it and I love that it's independent and that it follows the same format each week. I'll be back later this week with another peek at more of our centers. I have a lot to do today...like take a nap and go to Target. I love having the whole week off for Thanksgiving! 

Happy Monday!