One of many fantastic topics to teach in kindergarten is the alphabet! Students are like sponges in the classroom ready to absorb anything you put a song to when it comes to letters. As a kindergarten teacher, I was always looking for the most engaging ways to energize my students, so they would quickly learn their letters.
Letter Identification Activities
Sometimes I couldn’t find what I needed, so I would design it myself. I wanted students to have a lot of practice with each letter. In centers, it is not enough for students to write a letter. I wanted to help create a hands-on experience. So, we would use play doh to form letters, trace them on each other’s backs, and use rice or pudding in a pan to form a letter with our fingers. The class’ favorite way to learn about letter identification was to solve mysteries. It could be escape rooms, puzzles, or problems to solve as a classroom to find missing letters from the word wall. Anything that seemed “secret” was a hit!
Morning Work
Every morning my students would get a morning work tub with different activities. This would provide extra reinforcement with the letter for the week. They could choose a hands-on activity or their Morning Work Journal. Students played games, looked around the room for the hidden letters, and had to find all the letters for the week that were in a large pile mixed with other letters. They loved morning work!
The Next Step
Once students grasp letter identification, it’s time to work on the letter sounds. This is much more difficult than letter identification, but so rewarding!
Teachers are resigning from teaching in droves! I’m ONE of them. I loved teaching in the classroom. Being in the classroom for 20 years is one of my greatest life treasures. Now, like many teachers, I resigned and work full time out of the classroom, leaving my tenure behind. My field is still in education, but I’m out of the classroom.
WHY ARE THEY LEAVING?
While I can never talk on behalf of all teachers, I can share why I left the classroom. After meeting lots of other teachers who left the classroom, I found that we all had similar stories. The student behaviors are getting worse. You would think that would be the reason we left, but it is not. Helping troubled students was part of our vision. There’s an amount of pride in being able to help a student through their grief, anger, or loss. The reward it high. Some students we never think we reach, but years later, we receive letters of appreciation from them for our hard work.
So why? It is not about the behaviors, it’s about the lack of support from the administration and the district. There are many administrators who don’t have the best interest of the children in mind. Some have used a behavior situation to encourage a teacher to leave who they might not like, or they see that one teacher is talented with behavior problems and overload them with too many. The district doesn’t provide proper training for teachers to deal with severe problems. School counselors are busy doing lunch duty, testing or some other activity that has nothing to do with their job description. With many evaluations today, the teacher gets written up for not being able to handle behavior problems. How is writing a teacher up helping them learn how to handle a future behavior problem?
The lack of support is a helpless feeling for a teacher. Many teachers have had nervous breakdowns from being physically abused from the students and emotionally abused by their district who provide not support to the teacher. When you have to weigh teaching in a classroom with your own personal health, there is really only one option.
PREVENTION?
Yes, this can be prevented to where we can retain our most experienced and qualified teachers. Teachers need to gain the respect of being the professional in the classroom. They need to be taken seriously when they inform administration about behaviors. There should be a plan in place that EMPOWERS the teacher. The plan needs to provide the teacher with the knowledge of how to handle problems, insurance that they are not alone while dealing with severe behaviors, and real training prior to getting in the classroom that is on-going. Our students are in crisis! Our dedicated teachers are leaving! It’s time to fix the problem.
Have you ever heard about how powerful visualization can be to help people with their confidence, business, or personal life? Well, there is science to back it up! One of my favorite examples of visualization was listening Jim Carey talk about seeing his future. He would visualize being successful in detail when he had nothing. It made him feel better. He wrote himself a check for ten million dollars and dated it for 1995 for acting services rendered. Years later in 1995, he found out he was going to make ten million dollars on Dumb and Dumber.
That is a perfect example of how powerful your thoughts can be to your real life.
Why don’t more of us use this tool?
I found many scientific studies that show that the brain doesn’t differentiate between a real memory and a visualized one. If you visualize an item, an action or moments, your brain chemistry actually changes as if it was real. Your mind records the memory.
Become Confident
I used this technique many times when I needed to build my confidence. One time I had to talk to someone I feared, so I visualized the conversation before it happened. I found that I dominated the conversation and had the outcome I desired. If I didn’t visualize it, it could have left the conversation open to the other person to dominate. I would bet that the outcome would have been different.
Visualization is a skill I used when I first became a teacher. I feared talking in front of students. Even reading a book in front of them caused me a little anxiety. I would practice in my mind. The emotion of joy would fill my body as I could see the students gaining understanding from my lessons and giggling at my tone. It helped me get through my first year. Repetition turned my fear into something that is as natural as breathing for me now.
The trick is to pretend like you already have what your are wanting and attach an emotion to the event. This will ease your fear and anxiety of an event you might feel dread about attending. It will boost your confidence about following through with something you may fear.
PROOF
Many studies show that using visualization is effective to improving skills. Some studies showed evidence of visualization being just as effective as real practice when it comes to improving skills. This is why athletes’ use it in their training. It works well!
HOW To Visualize
Here are the techniques that are effective.
Close your eyes, mentally state your goal or your intention of the visualization.
Imagine the situation or event with all of your senses.
Place a STRONG emotion with the images. Feel as if it is real so your brain can record all the images while you feel the emotion.
Focus on breathing calmly. Repeat the whole process until it is clear and easy to imagine.
I hope these tips for visualization are helpful for you to gain confidence, take control of your life and change your mindset to achieve your dreams.
If your goal is to include families to be engaged in your family literacy night at school, you need to be creative. You will find some great ideas here. We will also focus on a Dinosaur Themed Escape Room that the entire school can participate in during Literacy Night. Here are some ideas, tricks and tips for a successful family literacy night.
Know your GOAL
First, you will want to think about what your main objective is for the night. Do you want to build family and school relations, connect the student with the parent, build and excitement about literacy, sell book fair books as a fundraiser or support parents with helping their children at home with literacy skills? Once you know your goals, it will help you think about your activities for the event.
Theme
Know your audience. What challenges will there be? Knowing your challenges ahead of time will help you prevent any mishaps during the night. Are there kids with needs, language challenges, or is it difficult to get your families to participate in school events after hours? Picking a great theme can motivate families to participate. Here are some theme ideas:
Camping
Reading in Pjs
Movie Night
Trunk or Treat
Superhero Books
Hollywood
Dinosaur Hunt Escape Room
Sports Jersey Night
Around the World
Activities
Selecting a theme will help you come up with some great themed activities. For example, if you are doing a camping theme, have tents up, have a special reading about camping, make s’mores at a station, a reading picnic or a photo booth with them catching a BIG FISH. The BIG FISH could be a book. All of the themes could have photo booths, professional storytellers, giveaways and stations full of literacy activities that include the parent.
Help and Reminders
Finally, sending home reminders regularly will increase the participation. Written invitations, phone messages, texts, calendars and emails are all great ways to remind families to participate in the Family Literacy Night. Most importantly, make sure you send a reminder home the day of the event. It helps to provide some incentive of a book giveaway that is high on the student’s interests meter or gift cards.
If you need help running stations, request parent volunteers. You can offer child care where a teacher watches siblings for the parents who are volunteering. You should encourage teachers to participate. One way is to let teachers know the theme, and let them pick an activity they would like to do with families. It doesn’t hurt to offer an incentive to the teacher volunteers either.
Dino-MITE Escape Room for Literacy Night
Kids love dinosaurs! What better way to get parents engaged with their children than an Escape Room with a dinosaur theme that they all can enjoy. Even teachers have fun with this Literacy Night theme! This escape room can be used for literacy night or for a single classroom to reinforce sight words, blends, problem solving and teamwork. They will have to open a box with surprises to escape their room! No need for locks or fancy boxes either!
This escape room is editable, but it comes with two activities that are differentiated. Students will solve 3 clues in order to solve the mystery, find a baby dinosaur and break out of the classroom. There are step-by-step directions, but you can easily change things around to fit your needs. The sight words, blends and riddle are all editable, if needed. It takes about 45 minutes to set up, 30-40 minutes to solve all the clues and 10 minutes to clean up! You will find invites, homework passes, reminders and photos of the easy set up. Check it out!
