Transcript

One of the things I most love to do with kindergartens is read. I often will read a text two, three, sometimes four times, and in the first read I usually preserve that for just enjoying the text and subsequent reads will delve into the text a little bit more to work on reading strategies. And, so that's done in a reading workshop format where I model to the students my thinking aloud as I'm using that reading strategy. Such as, visualization, or using my background knowledge or my schema, I might model myself "making predictions" and then the children, of course, would have opportunities to do that with those texts as well. 

I think it's really important to read a rich variety of fiction and non-fiction texts. I would highly recommend Phoebe Gilman's Something From Nothing. It's a wonderful story for having the children make predictions as a blanket is turned into various things throughout the story. There is also some wonderful repetition in the story, so the children can chime in those phrases. 

Another wonderful story by Leo Lionni called Swimmy. I love the author's message in this story, it's simply teamwork is important. 

And Leo the Late Bloomer, we learned that we all learn at different paces and it's OK to be different. 

A terrific kindergarten read is Knuffle Bunny by Mo Willems, it's a hilarious story where Trixie loses her favorite toy, and what child has that not happened to. It's great for self-to-text connections. 

Somewhere in Africa is a lovely story to remind us that our perspective can be a little off sometimes. So in this story the children learn that this boy who lives in Africa lives in a city much like the children do here. 

Wolf is another really funny story that involves farm characters, and the children in kindergarten love that. It reminds the kids how wonderful it is to learn to read. 

When reading a fiction text we often use our story glove to discuss the elements of the story. So we always talk about the title and the author, the characters, the setting, the problem, the solution, and the favorite part. And of course we have to discuss the big idea or the big theme in the story. 

When we read a non-fiction text we use this non-fiction glove to remind us how to discuss the text. So we talk about the topic, three facts that we learned, and then what are we wondering, so the big questions that come up. And that's that.

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