Fluency and Mother's Day!

How are your students with fluency?  Well, mine are getting better and better.  
Our reading program, Read Well, has fluency built into each unit.  Students have to be able to read so fast in each unit to help them understand the story.  If they can't do this, their grade suffers.  After two units of not getting the fluency, we (teachers) are supposed to stop and work on the areas that the students are suffering on.  My minders have struggled with fluency.  Then I got an idea to help them... 

I staple reading passages into their folder that they need help with.  Passages from the same unit they are on.  Then I partner the students up and have them practice their reading.

I taught the students how one student is the coach and the other one is the reader.  One begins the story and then they switch jobs at every sentence.  I do this at every sentence because it makes both students pay attention or they don't know where to read.  I time the students reading and then after a few minutes I have them stop.  Then we start again, but this time they switch who goes first and they go back to the very beginning.

We have learned all the phonograms we have to for kindergarten.  54 phonograms to be exact.  The double phonograms are very tricky.  We practice them every day by saying them out loud and we also practice writing them.  I have been adding different ways to have the students write them because they are super tricky.  This folder is a Handwriting Folder (you can read my post about them here) and I use this sometimes to help my students learn about the sounds.  I say a sounds and the students trace it!  The students love doing this. 

Next weekend is one of my favorite days.  It is Mother's Day.  We always have a Mother's Day Tea at my school and the students give their present to their mom on that day.  This year I wanted to make something new.  

I wanted to make something that mothers would treasure!  

I wanted to make something that mothers would appreciate.  

I took a couple different ideas and came up with what I wanted my students to make.  

Are you ready?

Each student got a canvas.  Two letter M's were taped on the canvas.

Next, we talked about flowers.  Then we painted flowers on the canvas together.  I showed them step by step what to do under the document camera.

Then, the next day we added the background/leaves to our beautiful flowers.

Once the background dried, we ripped of the taped M's.

A beautiful MOM flower for a beautiful Mom!

I took a picture of each of my students holding a bouquet of flowers.  I printed them off and added them to a frame the students painted.

Last we wrote a letter to our Mom's telling her why we loved her.

I love how everything turned out! I think it is precious and I hope the mom's love it too.

Have a Wolfelicious week!

Jamberry Independent Consultant
http://aprilwolfe.jamberrynails.net