We continue on with talking about how to assess literacy learning in young children as part of the Book Study Blog Party review of the book “Literacy Beginnings” (Fountas & Pinnell). In chapter 22 we talked about ways teachers can observe reading behaviors. Chapter 23 discusses ways teachers can observe writing behaviors by watching children in shared, interactive and independent writing activities. We are
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I’m Colleen Brunetti, and I’m pretty excited to join you all here on the SEEDS Blog! Before I dive into my topic, for today, I wanted to take just a minute to further introduce myself. Perhaps you’ve read my bio – primarily the list of professional pursuits and passions I find myself chasing. But to know how I got here, I have to look back there, way back, to
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We have used audio timers in our preschool classroom for years. The timer will buzz when it’s time to clean up toys or when snack time is over. The timer has been used to help children in sharing toys – if a child wants to play with a toy that another child has, teachers will set the timer and when it goes off, it’s
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As we continue to review “Literacy Beginnings” (Fountas & Pinnell) as part of the Book Study Blog Party – we will now look at ways to assess writing behaviors in young children. Similar to observing reading behaviors, teachers can observe writing behaviors by watching children in shared, interactive and independent writing activities. Shared/Interactive Writing Shared and interactive writing is when teachers and children write
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We are participating in a “Book Study Blog Party” organized by Vanessa at Pre-K Pages. Several early childhood bloggers (including us) will be discussing chapters of the book “Literacy Beginnings” by Gay Su Pinnell and Irene C. Fountas. I read the first 4 chapters today and took some notes. Here are some of my thoughts on the first 2 chapters. Chapter 1: “Growing up
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We are glad to introduce a new member to our expert panel – Colleen Brunetti … our Early Literacy (and Signing) Expert! Our experts will provide guest blog posts on specific topics, and help to answer questions that are submitted to us by our readers. Colleen Brunetti is a Masters level educator with a heart for kids who need that special boost. She holds
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As promised, today we have a guest post from Maggie Woodley of the Red Ted Art blog! Red Ted Art is a wonderful blog for all things crafty, and features kids crafts (suitable 18mths – 10yrs) and weekly tutorials (suitable for older children and adults). She has one son – known as “Red Ted”, and a little girl – “Pip Squeak”. 🙂 I’m excited that Maggy
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I am currently in the middle of planning summer camp for our preschool and child care program. It can sometimes be a daunting task to plan engaging activities for 5 full days a week for 8 weeks for both preschool and school-age children. I want them to have fun, be active and maybe even learn something while they are here. Each week of the
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We are in the middle of summer camp, and last week was all about animals. We broke out each day to focus on certain kinds of animals – we had Zoo Animals, On the Farm, Pet Day, Pond Life and Jungle Adventure. Here are a few of the activities that we had for each of these days: Zoo Animals • BOOKS: “Wild about Books”
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We are continuing to read “Literacy Beginnings” (Fountas & Pinnell) as part of the Book Study Blog Party. Chapter 5 is titled “Using a Framework for Language and Literacy Learning. The chapter starts off talking about essential learning experiences that need to be included in a prekindergarten classroom (some activities occur daily – others over the course of a week). Activities such as circle
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