Best Practices in ECS

One of the best practices that I continue to do in my room is to incorporate play as much as possible.
I have found that if children are happy and having fun, they are more likely to learn. On a daily basis, we sing songs and rhymes relating to numeracy and literacy. Play center time happens 4/6 times on the schedule. During this time, it is a perfect time to interact with the children in small groups, squeezing in opportunities to teach numeracy and literacy.



Kindergarten tests and the importance of play

Meaningful Morning Messages

This year I start everyday with a morning message. I have found this is a very good way to differentiate learning whole class. They begin with pair and share. Then students come up one at a time to tell us a word they already know, a letter they already know or a letter they want to learn. It has been amazing to watch some students read words I would have never known they could read. We talk about the strategies they use to figure out what they word is. This has also become a perfect opportunity for me to work on the components of the Reading Readiness Screening Tool. I Some of the activities that I  have been using with my morning message are:

• We circle the words they know and underline the letters they know. 
• We clap the words in the sentence. 
• Find rhyming words.
• Identify how many syllables in certain words.
• Breaking apart and putting together a word
• Oral Cloze

I have found that using a daily morning message has given the students a better understanding on why these skills are important to learn.

The students also love to count how many words they can read as a class. We count how many words are circled and do a few activities on this number. Showing the number in different ways etc. 

The following is a link with some information on the purpose behind a daily message and different activities that can be done with a daily message.

http://mrsjonesroom.com/jones/morningmessage.html