Welcome to kindergarten.
How long has it been since you remembered the days when you fell in love with your abc’s? Let me take you back there again . . .
This was our sweet, little class and we spent many happy hours in this little room. It wasn’t all work and writing letters . . . it was growing and learning and conversing and expanding their minds. Recess was awesome also – especially when teacher was inclined to give underducks on the swing set!
I had a verse on the wall behind my desk that was taken from the first part of Zechariah 4:10.
“For who hath despised the day of small things? for they shall rejoice . . .”
I loved this verse. Because I love little people. God doesn’t look down on anything with small beginnings that bring Him glory – for we must all begin somewhere. We can’t begin in 12th grade and knowing chemistry and geometry; we have to start way back at the very beginning. Even if it’s a small beginning with a small person who sits in a small desk, but with a giant heart. God is there in the little things, too.
Learning to Read
If you have lost your love of reading or learning, then I recommend teaching kindergarten. It is such a privilege to see it through a child’s eyes! Everything is so fresh and new and exciting. I mean, when was the last time you actually got excited because c-a-t spells a word that resembles a hairy creature that can claw and say “meow”?!
“. . . Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.”
Matthew 18:3b
Teaching little children brings this verse more meaning. Children are so innocent, simple, and trusting. Even their conversations around the art table were trusting. For example, God can do anything – at all – even more than Dad, yep, He’s even stronger than Dad! Did you know that?! Do I, as an adult, live each day like I truly believe that? Because these children do.
I absolutely loved teaching these little people. They filled my heart and day with joy.
The way Abeka curriculum teaches reading in kindergarten is to introduce the short vowels first. And I have found both in teaching kindergarten and also in music, that it helps to introduce a new concept and then reinforce it with visual aids and games. It’s a trick of the mind – they are learning when they really think they are playing!
To help with learning our short vowels, I purchased a printable bingo game from Teachers Pay Teachers website. If you are a teacher and haven’t yet discovered this site, let me be the first to send you there. It is awesome and I could spend hours just browsing the fun and educational resources available!
This bingo game became one of the favorite activities of kindergarten. Especially when Skittles were the prize!
Once Abeka teaches the short vowels, they then introduce the consonants. But with that, they will attach a short vowel to the new consonant. So let’s say we learned “b”. We don’t simply learn that “b” says b-b-b. Instead, we immediately attach a short vowel to it. “B” now says ba, be, bi, bo, and bu.
I love the way they teach the letters! Because we have learned blends, it’s one small, easy step to attach another consonant at the end and we now have a complete word. The day the children discovered this concept was the absolutely best day of kindergarten! Their little eyes lit up and they realized that they were actually reading words – words that meant something, like b-a-t.
On the Teachers Pay Teachers site, I purchased a file that let me make my own flashcards. So I printed up a whole bunch of CVC words (consonant-vowel-consonant), and we used these for games, as flashcards, and to also put on our word wall. That is what is in the picture above. I was in the middle of laminating these when I took the picture, but you can at least see the basic idea.
After they had learned the entire alphabet, then we got us another bingo game with all the letters in it. Can you tell we liked bingo?
We purchased brand-new ABC wall cards for kindergarten this year from Abeka – made of sturdy cardstock. But I wanted them to last as long as possible. And as I taught, I found myself printing games, etc. that needed to be laminated. So I purchased an inexpensive laminating machine and it has been so fun!
It is the Amazon Basics brand of laminating machine and works great so far.
I also purchased the Scotch Thermal Laminating Pouches. It was a pack of 100 sheets and I am telling you I had so much fun using these! When kindergarten was over for the year and I had to begin packing everything up, it felt sad to me. But as I began to laminate all my fun stuff I’d used in kindergarten, it helped to take away the edge off the sadness. It gave me hope that who knows what next year will bring!
As the children were beginning to learn to recognize numbers 1-10, I realized a few were having a struggle. So again, I racked my brain to come up with an idea that would teach them number recognition that went beyond flashcards and writing papers.
Behold our kindergarten “store”! I put a bunch of toys from home inside a box and labeled each one with a price sticker. The children were each given a bag containing 30 pennies and they could go purchase their toys. When they came to checkout at the teacher’s desk, they were required to state the price and then count out the pennies. They loved this as well and asked to play store often!
One corner of our classroom was the pencil corner. I found that it was less hassle for me to have a whole bunch of sharpened pencils on hand, than for them to continually ask to sharpen their own pencils. They usually used one pencil per class period and by then it was getting dull, so we would put them in the dull jar and get a sharp pencil out the beginning of the following period. Each day, it was one of the student’s jobs to sharpen all the dull pencils. I really liked our X-Acto electric pencil sharpener from Amazon. It didn’t cost much while doing an awesome job for the 4 months we had kindergarten, and is stored away for next year – still in good condition.
Playtime
Kindergarten isn’t just work. Neither is it just a babysitting room. We tried to both challenge them in their work, while making it fun – and also took off time almost every afternoon to do something creative. We ate lots of popcorn while sitting around the craft table!
We also took a couple trips outside the classroom to go on a walk, buy an ice cream cone, and visit the park. One time we even went to my home for a trampoline party. Because there were only five children, it was pretty simple to hop in my Toyota for our little jaunts. A bigger class would make that somewhat harder.
This was the project we made for Mother’s Day. The children had fun painting quite a bit this year! It’s not in the pictures, but I purchased a Melissa and Doug art paper roll dispenser. It is art paper that comes on a roll, but in a sturdy wooden dispenser with an even edge for tearing the paper off. I highly recommend this! It comes preloaded with one roll of paper and you can purchase more rolls to refill it. However, we didn’t even use the whole roll in 4 months.
So there you have a little peek inside my life for the past spring. Like most everything else in life, it had its challenges, too. But the blessings far outweighed the challenges as I was privileged to serve these little people!
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