Episode Summary
In this episode, we discuss 7 vital activities for a successful kindergarten year. We highlight building a classroom community, introducing alphabet concepts, math exploration, social-emotional learning, preparing for guest teachers, and providing a First Month of Kindergarten Survival Kit.
In this episode, I share:
- Building Classroom Community
- Introducing Alphabet Fun
- Math Exploration Time
- Teaching About Guest Teachers
Related Blog Posts:
- Top 10 Back to School Read Alouds
- 3 Kindergarten Writing Activities to do Before Launching Writer’s Workshop
- 10 Steps for a Smooth and Successful First Day of Kindergarten
Resources Mentioned:
- First Month Survival Kit TPT
- Back to School Activities Kindergarten
- This School Year Will Be the Best by Kay Winters
Connect with Zeba:
- Instagram – @kindergartencafe
- Facebook – @kindergartencafe
- Website – www.kindergartencafe.org
- Tik Tok – @kindergartencafe
First Month of Kindergarten Success Kit
Read the Transcript
[0:00] It’s that time of year again. It is almost back to school. Some of you are already back to school, but that’s crazy. Most of you are nearing the start of school. I still have a solid month, yay, of summer. This is where the East Coast people are happy because we were all sad when you were on vacation in May, and we were nowhere near vacation, but now we’re happy because we still have a month left of summer and you don’t. I’m so sorry. Anyway, enough bragging. I’m going to talk to you about seven activities that you’re going to want to do to start your year in kindergarten. Let’s get into it.
[0:39] Music. You’re listening to the Kindergarten Cafe Podcast, where kindergarten teachers
come to learn classroom-tested tips and tricks and teaching ideas they can use in their classroom right away. I’m Zeba, creator and founder of Kindergarten Cafe, and I help kindergarten teachers with everything they need from arrival to dismissal in order to save time, work smarter, not harder, and support students with engaging and purposeful lessons. I’m here to cheer you on through your successes and breakthroughs and offer support support, and resources so you never have to feel stuck or alone. Ready to start saving time and reducing your stress all while using effective and purposeful lessons that students love? Let’s get started.
[1:33] The first activity that you’re going to want to do to start your year in kindergarten is classroom community building activities. Specifically, I love to start the year not day one, more like day four or five. Give the kids time to learn a lot of routines. That’s really all we’re doing the first three, four days solidly is just routines. But I like to know what the kids’ hopes and dreams are for the year. This is a responsive classroom idea where they start by sharing their hopes and dreams. But what I found is for kindergarten, they need a little bit more guidance on this. So we like to share ideas or read books like this school year will be the best year yet, something like that. I’ll put the actual link and title down below in the show notes. But there’s one part of that book where they have a chocolate fountain, and I either skip that part or say like, well, that’s not possible. What would be possible for us to do this year? What do we want to learn? What do we want to get better at? And a lot of them choose reading, writing, science. But it’s nice for them to share those ideas. It’s a great way to start off the year. and it’s fun to look back on at the end of the year to see what their hopes and dreams were. I always hang these up when students are done working on them and then they go into their portfolios.
[2:52] These hopes and dreams then become the catalyst for our next activity, which is creating the classroom rules together. So I say, in order for us to make these hopes and dreams possible, we have to create some rules for our classroom so that everyone can be safe and everyone can learn. And I love reading Officer Buckle and Gloria to help us launch the idea of why rules help keep us safe and help us learn. And then what happens again this is based on a responsive classroom but the kids just brain dump all of their possible rules we get them all on paper and as they’re doing that they often will say well don’t do this don’t do that I’m changing that language into the more positive wording so if they say don’t run in the hallway I say okay what should we be doing we should be walking in the hallway. So I’ll write walk in the hallway. After we do our brain dump of all the rules, we leave it for a day. We come back to it the next day. And I’ll ask if there’s anything else they want to add, if there’s anything else that’s missing. And I’ll say, you know, I really thought about it. And this is a lot of rules. This is too many to remember. And they’re like, yeah, this is a lot of rules. I don’t know if I can do it. And I’ll say, I think that some of them kind of go together. And I’ll circle the ones that go together in my head based on the rules that I want want to use. And for the past several years, I’ve made the rules are team. So it’s easy to remember because we’re a team.
[4:20] Take care of the classroom. Everyone is kind. Always be a first-time listener and make expected choices. And those, every rule that they come up with fits into one of those categories. So I’ll group them all together and I’ll say, well, what if we did it like this? And then everyone says, yeah, that’s great. And then they all sign our contract that we have, our rules poster. It’s not really a contract, but we have a rules poster and they all sign it. And I put it up on the wall and I reference it weekly or else it just becomes wallpaper, as we know from a few episodes ago about classroom decoration.
[4:54] The third activity that you probably want to do in your first month of kindergarten, is a week introducing the idea of the alphabet, letters, stuff that they’re going to be learning about for the next month. This is not the only time they’re going to learn about letters. This is just introducing it in a fun way. While the curriculum you have is probably light, while their attention spans are short and you’re looking for things to fill up the time, while they’re still learning routines, I like to do a chicka chicka boom boom week week where we’ll read the book. And then we’ll do different class books based on their names, based on their letters of their names. So kindergarten starts with a K. They’ll do one for their name. So for me, Miss McGibbon starts with an M. I’ll draw a big M. I’ll color it in. One of the days I’ll make a M headband.
[5:48] I’ll put it onto a sentence strip and make it be a big M and the crown for the first letter for my name, or I’ll do Z for Ziba, whatever. The kids, it’s obvious with the kids, you do the first letter of their name and they wear it in the crown. They take their picture. It’s very cute. They get to decorate it however they want with lots of stickers. That’s a really fun week of just like introducing the letters. We’ll do a lot of magnetic letter explorations. They have fun with that. Some other books that we make at the the beginning of school are based on brown bear, brown bear. So they’ll do like a kindergarten, kindergarten, what do you see? I see Miss McGibbon looking at me. Miss McGibbon, who do you see? So we take their picture. They write their name in the book. We can also do it as a morning meeting greeting. We can also do the cookie jar.
[6:37] Who stole the cookies from the cookie jar? Miss McGibbon stole the cookies from the cookie jar. Who, me? Yes, you. Couldn’t be. Then who? I think Pete stole stole the cookies from the cookie truck. So you could do that as a morning meeting greeting. Make it into a class book. The kids love looking at these. They know the story. They’re familiar with it. And all they have to do is write their name. And you can glue in their picture so the kids know whose name they’re reading on the page. We also make one for Pete the Cat in the school shoes. We take a picture of the kids’ shoes and they write their name. And then we cover the name with a little flap so the kids see the shoes in the book and they have to guess whose shoes those belong to, and then they flip up the flap and see the name. We read all these books. These are great extension activities.
[7:22] Again, at the beginning of the year, they have very low attention spans. These are quick activities, and then the kids can read these books, Throughout the whole rest of the year, they love looking at these books.
[7:31] So that was a lot of bonus activities. But really, we’re on to activity four, which is a week on student names. So after Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, we’ll do a week on student names. This is a great way to launch literacy because they can learn a lot about the phonological rules and skills from looking at their names. They can rhyme with their names. They can clap out syllables with their names. They can talk about beginning sounds with their names. Names talk about the letters in their names so I have a whole week-long unit on the names on why we value student names and why names are important to us fun class projects all that stuff it’s a really fun way to launch the year some of those class books that I mentioned before about brown bear brown bear cookie jar like they’re all great ways to extend this unit on like our names are important and we want to learn each other’s names that we call each other the right name things like that. And then doing any kind of whole class greetings where the kids are learning each other’s names are really important.
[8:30] Activity five, math exploration.
[8:33] You’re going to want to give students time to explore with the math tools before you actually are asking them to use them as tools. You’re going to want to give them a chance to play and explore with them before you put any kind of academic demand on them. So put out counting bears, put out pattern blocks, unifix cubes on the tables and just see what they do with them. You’re going to think to yourself, well, they’re going to get bored. This is not going to last very long. Well, considering how short their attention span does last in the beginning of the year, they can explore with these tools for a long time because they’re open-ended and the kids love to just explore with them. So give them time at the beginning of the year before you start your curriculum to just explore with these tools. And you can use it as a launching point to teach them the routines of any stations or centers that you’ll have. You can have them, if you’re going to have them rotate, if you’re going to have them free flow, whatever it is, all you need to do when you’re introducing the centers is have out these tools, nothing else, very simple, no academic demands, and you can have them use those tools to practice whatever routine it is that you’re going to want them to do for that math center time or station time. When you’re you’re introducing it, you’re going to do one to two centers at a time, and then you can slowly add on a third, and then slowly add on a fourth until they get really good at it, and then they can start doing it more independently or with more academically demanding tasks as opposed to just exploring with math tools.
[10:03] Activity number six, social emotional learning. You’re going to want to do this all year long. The first lessons that I teach my students are about listening, why we listen, how we show we’re listening. Independence, ask three before me is a huge time saver for you, but a really important lesson on independence that they can ask each other for help, not just ask the teachers. And at the beginning of the year, I love to read Have You Filled a Bucket Today and have them do a class book on what it means to be a bucket filler, as in what does it mean to be kind to others? Because this is kind of language that I’ll use throughout the year. So I want to front load it at the beginning of the year saying, you know, they dipped my bucket, they filled my bucket, all that kind of stuff.
[10:49] And the final activity, activity seven, that you’re going to want to do in the first month of kindergarten is proactively and preventatively teaching the students about about guest teachers. I mean, substitute teachers. I call them guest teachers because it gives them a little bit more respect, puts them on the same sort of level field as a regular teacher. I like reading Ms. Nelson Goes Missing or there’s a Ms. Spender Garden Stays Home one. There’s a Pete the Cat and the guest and the substitute teacher. I like reading these and creating a a guest teacher book with the students. I’ll do this after three to, I’ll do this like week three or four, if I can wait, if I, unless I have to be out for some reason that early in the year, because I want them to know the routines enough that they can then write about those routines in the guest teacher book for the guest teacher.
[11:42] This helps prepare the students for the fact that the guest teacher is not going to know the routines like they know the routines. It will be different, and that’s okay. They’re going to have to be flexible, but this book will help teach the teacher about some of the important routines we have in our class that we want them to know about. So they might choose to write about how we push in our chairs when we come to the rug, or when we pack up, we sit in the red row if we’re a car dismissal, or we always wash our hands before snack time. And the kids can kind of decide what’s important to them. And if they’re stuck, you can think about if there’s any parts of the day that might be tricky that you want the teacher to know about. But it’s important not to wait too long in this, because eventually you will be sick or you’ll have to take a day off for some reason and the kids will have a guest teacher.
[12:29] And they won’t be prepared for it mentally, and they won’t know what to do, and it’ll cause chaos for them, the teacher. And so it helps to proactively prepare them for what happens when you’re not out and how that means that maybe you’re sick, and then you’ll come in the next day and, you know, we’ll have to be flexible with the guest teacher, all that stuff. But it’s good to do it sooner rather than later because, yeah, eventually you will get sick. Those are the seven activities that I would make sure to do in the first month of kindergarten.
[12:56] If you are looking for an easy way to do all of these activities and then some. If you’re looking for an easy way to have everything ready to go and everything you need for the first month of kindergarten, please check out the First Month of Kindergarten Survival Kit that I have on Teachers by Teachers or my website. It has all these activities and more, literally everything I do with my students the first month of kindergarten, so everything you could possibly need, as well as a scoped sequence for the first month so you know what it is to teach and when. And I have a ton of resources in blog posts on all of these topics. So I’ll put those links in the show notes as well so that you can learn more if you are interested. But reach out with any questions. Definitely share this episode with a friend. Consider leaving a review. It takes two seconds and really means a lot to me and to the podcast. And let me know how the activities go when you try them with your your students. And I’m wishing everyone, no matter when you go back to school, that you have a really wonderful back to school season. And I’m here for you if and when you need help.
[14:00] Music.
[14:05] Thanks so much for listening to the Kindergarten Cafe podcast. Be sure to check out the show notes for more information and resources, or just head straight to kindergartencafe.org for all the goodies. If you liked this episode, the best ways to show your support are to subscribe, leave a review, or send it to a friend. I’ll be back next week with even more kindergarten tips. See you then!