Sunday, August 11, 2013

Up Way Too Early

I was up WAY too early for this Sunday morning.  My three year old came in shortly before 6:00 am and announced he was feeling mad.  I told him that me feeling tired trumped his feeling mad and he needed to go back to sleep.  SO I marched his little butt back to bed and he did go back to sleep, thankfully, but did I?!  Nope!  I decided to use that time for lesson plans.

We have been using Letterland the past two years in Kindergarten.  The first eighteen days of school is what's called a "Fast Track".  It's a quick dip into each letter of letterland in those eighteen days.  After that, we jump into a more closer look at each letter, their name, shape, sound, you name it... we spend time doing it.  I am now going on days twenty-six to thirty.  We will have focused on four different letters: Annie Apple, Clever Cat, Dippy Duck, and Harry Hatman.

Here is my trouble... WHY is this program teaching those letters/sounds first?  And WHY do they teach the vowel sound with the letter, like Annie Apple?  She says 'a' as in apple but she belongs to Mr. A who says 'a' like ape.  SO confusing for these beginning Kinders.  They looked at me like I had ten heads.  Now, I know it was many years ago that I taught K and I have been with firsties for quite some time, but if I recall correctly, we taught in this sequence: rhyming, initial consonants, final consonants, and then vowels very last. When did this change?  I feel like I am teaching rhyming for those who cannot hear OR produce one and then initial consonants at one time.

Anyways, I created an initial consonant sort for the four Letterlanders we are working with recently.  They will use a pocket chart sort with the picture cards and then come back to the table and complete the sort I made.  Use if you like.  It's nothing fancy but just enough to get the point across to the kiddos.  I am going to make one each time we come across four more Letterlanders and even throw in some review.  Click on Annie Apple to grab the sort.






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