As the first week of school wrapped up, we continued to learn about following rules / expectations and participated in getting to know each other activities. We read the story No David! by David Shannon. The students paired up and practiced looking for the rules that David was breaking as we read the story. After the story, students made David Popsicle stick puppets and retold the story using the puppets. You can find the No David! puppets here.
The next day we read Chicka Chicka Boom Boom by Bill Marin Jr. and talked about how letters make up words, and the most important word we know is our name! Students wrote their name in boxes, cut them up and put them back in the correct order. They counted the number of letters in their name and wrote the number.
Then we continued to get to know each other by sharing how many letters are in our name, and saying our favorite color. Then we graphed how many letters are in our name to as a little math extension!
Finally, one thing I’ve been really trying to teach my students this year is proper use of shared materials and not wasting. Students have been learning how to making good use of glue sticks and not wasting bottled glue. They have been taught the phrase “just a dot, not a lot”. I gave them a worksheet copied on card-stock where they glued on the dots of the worksheet, trying not to overuse the glue. To find out more about this idea go here.
Today we continued to work on learning about our names. First we read a sing along book called “The Wheels on the Bus” by Raffi and then sang along to the book after we learned that version of the song. Then we came up with our own silly verse of the wheels on the bus by using the first letter in our name to complete the verse. Instead of making the line, “The wheels on the bus go round and round”, we changed the line to “The wheels on Mr. Bowen’s bus go Bumpity Bumpity Bump.”
We read the story Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and talked about how letters and the alphabet help us read words and sentences. We talked about one of the most important words we should know, and that’s our name! We practiced writing our names and making them by cutting out the letters and gluing them back in order. We also counted the number of letters in our name.
As start to finish up with our back to school unit we learned “Wheels on the Bus” song. We discussed how we do not have school buses in Shaktoolik and we saw a video school buses to introduce our students to what a school bus is.
Then we created a graph illustrating how people from our classroom gets to school. The answers consisted of walking, four-wheeler, riding a bike, and by truck.
Students then got to make a construction paper school bus and rewrote the song to fit the initial sound that they hear in their name.
Since our K-1 All-Stars are a majority of Kindergarteners this year, we’ve really been focusing on the basics. This is why we are the “Chicka Chicka Boom Boom” K-1 All-Stars this year! This will be something we explore all year by learning our letter names, sounds, and decoding skills. Also one of the important skills many of our Kindergarteners face this year is name recognition.
K-1 students received coconut tree printouts where they got to stamp the letters of their name onto their tree as well as decorate the tree.
As part of our back to school celebration we read the story “Chicka Chicka Boom Boom” (our classroom theme for this year) and practiced singing the ABC’s in various different ways. We sang it the traditional ways as well as the Phonics Song from Have Fun Teaching youtube!
Then we practiced writing the letters in our name, cutting them out and gluing them in order. Then we also counted how many letters were in our name and made a class graph of who had the most letters in their name and the least amount of letters.
For children out here in the isolated villages of Alaska, going to school does not mean going to school on a bus. However as part of our back to school unit, we discussed how others get to school. Children explained how they got to school by walking, riding a 4-wheeler, or riding in their papa’s truck. I asked students if they had ever seen a school bus. Many students talked about visiting Anchorage and seeing them in Anchorage. As a class I explained how many students can ride on a bus at once to go to school. We sang “The Wheels on the Bus” song, as well as changed one of the lines in the song “The wheels on the bus go bumpity bump, bumpity bump, bumpity bump.” To support children in understanding initial sounds, we did phoneme substitutions for that specific line. For example if a student chose the letter T, the line would be; “The wheels on the bus go tumpity tump, tumpity tump, tumpity tump.”
We wrote our names in name strips one letter in each box. We cut out the boxes and arranged them back in the correct order and counted the numbers of letters in our name.
Then we completed the sentences by writing the corresponding number. We displayed our names in the hallway and tomorrow we will create a class graph that shows who has the most letters in their name.
To download your own copy of the letters in my name click here!
The Kindergarten All-Stars 
