It’s April 20 already??? I can’t believe it is less than a month until my kinders leave the nest and progress to first grade.  

This is CRUNCH time! 
Assessments are underway, tests are just a week or two away and we are pulling the proverbial rabbit out of the hat on a daily basis.  Why? Because we have grown to love these sweet students in our charge, and we want them to succeed! 
There will always be standards and achievement testing, and we only have one shot each year at helping these youngest students feel successful!  Time to pull out all stops!

Let’s begin with ELA:

This is the time of year we hit all sight words EVERY day.  Students who say they are ready to try, come to me to go through the sight words on ESGI.  (What? You haven’t heard about ESGI? If you haven’t, you need to sign up for a trial membership and be shocked at how much time you will save when assessing students.  Go on! Give it a try!)

This takes minimal time, and it gives me a lot of valuable information about what words are trending as difficult for my kiddos.  This data allows me to tailor the sight word slideshow and other sight word resources to cover the most difficult words for our whole group.  And, hearing the students chant the hard words gives other students the incentive to learn! 

What is in my arsenal of sight word goodies? 

The first thing we do every day is this slideshow that includes all of our words.  It is aligned to the order of words in our series, but it can be used in ANY classroom as a review of basic words every student should be exposed to.  This daily exposure to our words will eventually take hold (as it has in my own class), and students will truly know words by sight by year’s end.  

Another must have resource for any kindergarten classroom is the series of Sight Word DVDs from Heidi Songs.  

My students LOVE these, and they will sing when they take an assessment–just to help them recall our words.  With requisition time here, you may be able to convince your admins to buy you a set! You will not be disappointed.  

As you can see, my plan involves slideshow chants, singing the words, and finally WRITING the words.  

For writing the words I use this read, write and stamp set.  

If you must give an end of year benchmark assessment, this is a great review of all components of the assessment.  Students practice letter naming fluency, first sound fluency, nonsense word fluency, and phoneme segmentation fluency in a fun way.  I use this a few weeks before actually giving the assessment.  It takes some of the mystery out of it while helping students build fluency.  

For Math, we use a lot of Harry Kindergarten videos, and other youtube resources.  
One of my most favorite videos is another 
Heidi Songs DVD called Musical Math.  
                           

Heidi sells cds too! But for my classroom, the dvds with the songs and visual cues really work! 

Now, for the fun! We have a center that everyone runs to.  It’s our monthly featured “Magic Writing” Center.  In this center, students practice tracing and reading familiar words in context.  The fun part is the use of white crayon followed by water color wash over the top.  This is known as color resist…something my art teacher taught us many years ago.  It is a well known process, but not so well-known to kinder kids! They go bananas when they try it for the first time.  To introduce this fun center type to you, I have marked my April and May centers down to $1 for the remainder of April.  Try them.  You’ll see what I mean! lol 

                                May teaches the life cycle of a butterfly!