A Place Called Kindergarten: 2014

MobyMax Giveaway

Enter to win MobyMax for your students to practice their skills. No technology at your school...you can set up MobyMax and send home login letters for your students to practice their skills at home. Enter to WIN HERE. Mrs. Bell

Dear Santa, I want MobyMax for Christmas {giveaway}

I recently set my students up on MobyMax. Currently we are practicing math skills. My students logged in and took the math placement test in small groups on iPads. This test determines what lessons your students should start with. I am having my students start where they tested, but you can also assign curriculum for them to practice. After everyone took the placement test, I bravely had all 25 of my students log in on iPads to practice math skills. I was so surprised that the login process went well. I had them go through Safari, search for MobyMax, type in our school code and their individual user name and password. My backup plan was to have them click the home button and go to the kindergarten apps, so it was a hallelujah moment when everyone was logged in. A shortcut would be to create a button from the site. Here are a few pictures of my smarties practicing math skills on MobyMax...

You can just imagine me behind the camera breathing a big sigh of relieve that this whole process worked.
After the success of our MobyMax lesson, I was thrilled with all the information this site provided. The back end of the site gave me information about what skills my students have mastered and what tasks they will be working on next.
Things I like about MobyMax... It is an individualized way to practice skills. The kids can earn rewards and game time after they practice their skills. If they get an answer wrong, they are shown the correct answer. It is a way to work on skills using technology. You can send home a student login letter for practice at home.
Things I found a little frustrating about MobyMax... I thought that the pretest was a little difficult for some of my kiddos. (This is the reason why we took the placement test in small groups.) There is A LOT to learn about this site. I feel like I have only touched the surface of how I can use this site with my students...

a Rafflecopter giveaway Mrs. Bell

I {heart} cyber monday

Get to my Teachers Pay Teachers Store HERE.

toss tell and take

Toss Tell and Take My students love Toss, Tell and Take Kindergarten Math so much,

that I created Toss, Tell and Take Kindergarten Language Arts.

This is an organized, fun way to practice kindergarten language arts skills. This is a great guided reading activity or can be used to provide language arts intervention.

The following Kindergarten Common Core Standards

can be assessed and practiced with this packet...

RF.K.1 Recognize and name all upper and lowercase letters.

RF.K.3 Associate the long and short sounds for the five major vowels

RF.K.3 Demonstrate basic knowledge of letter-sound correspondence by producing the primary sound for each consonant.

RF.K.3 Read common high-frequency words by sight.

RF.K.2 Isolate and pronounce the initial, medial vowel, and final sounds (phonemes) in three-phoneme (consonant-vowel-consonant, or CVC) words.

RF.K.2 Recognize and produce rhyming words.

See this unit in action.

These smarties are practicing identifying long and short vowel sounds

during their guided reading group...

Get the bundle of these two units HERE.

character traits in kindergarten

I use Kid Adsit and Michele Scannell's reader's workshop units. Their Digging Deeper unit focuses on characters and settings. I was frustrated with my students' simple responses to describe characters. Everyone knows that Goldilocks is a girl with blonde hair. I wanted them to be able to do a little more thinking about characters, so I created this character traits unit for kindergarten learners. I picked words to describe characters that five and six year olds could relate to. Here is how this unit works...

Read a story...