I chose a lesson called Gingerbread Phonics to review. I think that phonics is very important especially in kindergarten. Christmas is coming up pretty soon and this is one that I can use in my own classroom. In this lesson the teacher reads the story The Gingerbread Man aloud to students and invites them to read along during the refrain. The next day the teacher rereads the lesson and places sentence strips with the refrain writen on them up for the students. Students will practice reading the refrain and take turns finger pointing to it. On the third day the story is reviewed and students are asked to point out their favorite words. These words are writen on sentence strips and displayed. Special attention is given to the beginning sound of each word. After completing this activity along with a website about beginning sounds students will write their own stories using the new words they have found. These stories can be published on the internet and shared with each other.
I think this is a lesson I could use in my classroom. My kindergarten students are working on recognizing beginning sounds and this would be another way to do that. I am not sure how many of them could write their own stories using the new words, but we could write some sentences and write a story together as a class. I would also like to try this idea with other books. This lesson is easy to prepare for and appropriate for kindergarten students.
I found the Read Write Think website really early to use. I like that each lesson has a grade span and a quick overview. It makes it really easy to view a lot of lessons quickly. I also found it helpful that they list resources and national standards. I will use this website again to find new lesson ideas.
Ashley Montgomery