Start of Literacy Stations

Every year in kindergarten, I like to wait until October to start my literacy stations.  It seems like many of you in the blog world dive in way before I do.  I like to get my little kinders going with the routines of the classroom for awhile before I throw anything like this into the mix.  Also, this year I am very excited to have our ELL teacher push-in during literacy station time.  We have two fabulous ELL teachers in our building.  They also needed to get their groups up and running before adding literacy stations into the mix.

I spent tid bits of time last week introducing the literacy stations.  I would explain each station and then show the students what to do and then have a student model the station.  I felt like if I introduced them all at once the kiddos would be overwhelmed!!  Since they had some background knowledge, when we started this week I gave the abbreviated version of what to do.  I was so nervous when I sent each little pair off to their literacy station, but they did AWESOME!!!  It was the best first day of literacy stations I have ever had in kindergarten.  I am so proud of them and of course I gushed all over them when we through to let them know how proud I was!!

Here is a little peak at some of my literacy stations:

These students are listening to one of our favorite stories....Pete the Cat:  I Love My White Shoes.

This is my ABC station for now.  There are baggies with different puzzles.  The students match the picture with beginning letter.

She is "Writing the Room".  The students each get a clipboard and a pencil and find words they can read in the room.  After literacy stations, I have them read the words they wrote to me.

This is my pocket chart station.  Right now, the students are putting letter cards in ABC order.  They have a set of uppercase and a set of lowercase.

And the most exciting station......computer/smartboard station.  Last year our school PTO donated $100 to each classroom to purchase educational games for our smartboards.  These games came from Lakeshore.  The students are LOVING it!

Big Book Station......They take turns one person turns the pages and the other "reads" the story.  As I was going around snapping pictures, these two were having an awesome conversation about what the book was about and making up a story based on the pictures.  It made me smile!!

At the classroom library, the students can read to a reading buddy a.k.a. a stuffed animal or read into a toobaloo or just read a book.

This is my poetry station.  I put poems we have learned in class in this station.  The students put the strips in order, match the word cards to the sentence strips, match the pictures to the poem, and then read the poem.  If they finish, there is extra copies of the poem in our poetry notebook that they can "butter" popcorn words and color.

This is not all of my classroom literacy stations, but it is a good start.  I am also trying to find time in my daily schedule to add some math stations.  I think if I do that, they would only be for about 15 minutes. It seems we are just so busy all the time! :)

Have a good weekend!