Help me give my students activity tubs, magnetic letters, stamps, and other items to create a classroom that is more than just textbooks and worksheets!
I teach 22 low- income kindergarteners full day! These 5-6-year-olds are full of curiosity and creativity. They love learning, especially when they get to be hands-on!
Being a low- income school many kindergartens are not socially emotionally ready for kindergarten when they start.
This means they still need to play in their day. Pushing them into a 7 hour day and a classroom that does only worksheet and textbook quickly takes away that love of learning and allows them to fall academically behind early on.
At the end of kindergarten students are expected to write their names, know their letters and letter sounds, know basic reading skills such as directionality, 1 to 1 pointing, and simple strategies to decode text. They are expected to know how to read and write sight words, how to count to 100, recognize numbers, and shapes. They learn about plants and animals, pushes and pull forces, people in our community, fine motor skills and so much more!
My Project
These materials will make a big difference in our classroom. In our kindergarten class, I have found that learning through play and activities shows the most academic growth. It provides the students an "experience" that they can recall on. For example when learning about the letter “i” we made homemade ice cream (with sprinkles of course). For the letter T, we made paper plate turtle that the students got to cut and paint with sponges. We have even decorated paper gingerbread cookies and graphed which part of the cookie we bite first in math!
Learning does not need to just be textbooks and worksheets.
These kinds of experiences allow the students to learn through hands-on learning/play and develop a love for school early on. These materials will also help with our fine motors skills which many students in my class struggle with, not due to a lack of love but from a lack of exposures to materials that helps develop them.
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