Musical Chairs

This year it seems we are working hard in my kindergarten classes for every letter we learn.  It just isn't coming easy to some of these little guys. Therefore, we have had to slow down and do lots of different activities to strengthen letter knowledge and review, review, and review!

I don't usually have to make ABC books in my class.  We usually pick up the letters pretty quickly and spend more time on phonemic awareness and eventually reading.  But this year is different.  So we are making our ABC books,  being sure that students choose what makes a personal connection for them.

We stretch those sounds like crazy!  T t t t t tiger!  One little one loves tomatoes, so that was her connection for the letter Tt.  She is also the one who came up with m & ms for the letter Mm.  I think this girl likes to eat yummy foods!   

I bought a new app for us too.  I had ABC Magnetic lite, but it only had capital letters.  So we got the full version and I am loving that app!  I don't just use it for my kinders and letter sorting.  I also use it for Making Words lessons with my older students.  Works beautifully for that!

We have worked so hard on adding some new letters to our list of known letters that we got to play Musical Chairs today, ABC style!!

We took our chairs and placed letter cards on them.  Then for the music, I played a youtube abc video where we said our ABCs along with the video as we walked around.  

For the musical chairs activity, I just copied my letter cards in black and white.  I don't print everything in color.  Anyone else do that?  We don't have color printers to use at school, so I pick and choose what is special enough for color.

These are the cards I used.  Then on Friday, after working with these cards during the week for musical chairs and other activities, we will do a search and sort the room using one of the search and sort pages.  The students have gotten really good and finding those letters.  Then they have to read their letters that they found to a partner to further check that they really do know them.  I am always telling them that it does no good to copy things they don't know what they are copying!