Word Work Wednesday!

Today is word work Wednesday!  On Wednesday's I teach Kindergarten.  We are working on writing labeling and writing 3 part stories.  We always start our day with journal time but recently I have been using that time to do our mini lesson on writing.  I forgot to take pictures of our anchor charts today.  Next week I will post all of our charts.  We started our mini lesson with a review on drawing, labeling and coloring a picture. 

Writing workshop, they are drawing, labeling and coloring a picture. I learned these ideas from Crystal at www.kreativeinkinder.blogspot.com  at the  Virtual Teaching Expo Everything K

Here is one of the pictures (these are in their journals so it is on wide ruled paper)

This student is extremely detailed.  You can clearly see he drew in pencil, labeled, and colored using at least 5 colors!  He is 5 years old!! 

Today our writing workshop was so much fun because usually I have them write a sentence and then illustrate what they wrote.  Today I told them to draw, label and color their picture and they didn't have to write a sentence.  They all wanted to write a sentence and did without me even telling them to!! 

Here is the sentence that goes with the picture above.  It says "Sneakers is planting the flowers."  The only thing I had him correct was the N needed to be lowercase and asked him to tell me what special sound was at the end of flower.  He remembered and corrected it on his own.  I love this!  "Sneakers" was our "elf on the shelf" ;) they still talk about him!!   

Later on in the day we had our writing lesson and our regular writing workshop where they are working on 3 part stories.  To help us remember how to write stories we have "Steve the Story telling caterpillar"  He is a puppet and we have him on one of our anchor charts. 

Steve the Story Caterpillar.  I read about Anchor Charts in the book Teaching with intention.

We brainstormed about how to write a story, then we did interactive writing and we all wrote a story together on the board.  After that everyone chose a title for their stories and began writing.  When they were finished I met with each of them individually to discuss their stories.  I was amazed and proud of their stories!!  They were so creative and original.  I will post them next week after they finish illustrating them. 

During our writing workshop and reading groups we had word works or literacy centers.  Here are some pictures of what we are working on.  Everything that is out on the language shelves is all review to them and they work independently. 

This is the Moveable Alphabet.  She is working on her "pink words" , they are 3 letter short vowel words.

This is the "insta learn board".  I believe this is an absolute must for every classroom and homeschool room!!  I could and should write a whole post dedicated just to this board.  Zack is working on spelling words with digraphs.  This board is leveled and self correcting. 

This little girl is working on long vowel, rhyming words.  The children have to figure out how to spell the words and it will not fit if it is spelled incorrectly.  The cards are color coded so they always know what level they are working on.  Like I said... A maz ing!!!!  They also have a math one, but that is for another day! :)

Sight word horse races from scholastic.

Letter and word poking (kindergarten does words and preschool does letters)

After I teach morning Kindergarten we go home and finish our day homeschooling!

This is Allie doing her word work, compound word magnets from the good ole' Dollar Store!! 

This is another fabulous Dollar Store find!  A word wall spinner with commands.  Allie LOVED this work!!

One of the commands on the spinner was to define a word, so we just expanded on this and defined several words. 

After that Allie chose a word in the dictionary to be her new vocabulary word.  We call those our magic words and she gets a sticker on her chart every time she uses the magic word correctly!

We do some type of "word sort" activity everyday.  This one is from Hillary Lewis at Rockin Teacher Materials  Her Spelling has improved 100% since we started doing word works!!! 

Allie finishing up her polar bear research report during our writing workshop. 

We finished up our day with writing workshop.  We also have anchor charts in our homeschool classroom but they are a little more advanced.  Allie has discovered that she does like to write stories when she knows how!!  Homeschooling for her has been such an incredible blessing!  Tonight, the last thing she said before she fell asleep was..."Thank you mommy for homeschooling me and always planning fun things to do!"  It just made my heart melt and all the late nights laminating, cutting and printing are so worth it!!! 

Sorry this post was so long, I guess I had fun writing and doing word works today too!!  I hope you enjoyed it too!