It's Not All Cut And Paste In Kindergarten Anymore!

Remember kindergarten? We used to cut, paste, make finger painting masterpieces and practice our roles as future moms and dads in the housekeeping section. Oh sure, we learned to count, write numbers and identify colors, but I loved the down time! When was the last time you walked in to a kindergarten room?  I think you would be surprised by what you see.  I have taught kindergarten for 4 years.  Students still play in housekeeping, and unleash their creative juices in many arts and crafts projects.  They are also, taking Accelerated Reader tests, playing Mega Math (a software tool provided by our math book publishers) to practice the latest taught math skills and writing the missing ending sound under pictures on our class ActivBoard. Software tools aren’t just for older students, our primary students benefit from them as well.

Three types of software tools are identified in classrooms today: word processing, spreadsheets and data bases. These tools do not stay for long, as companies develop more improved tools. In any given school day I personally use the word processor because it saves time, makes documents look more professional, and allows me to easily share my documents with coworkers or parents. Spreadsheets are great for graphing information a class collects, grades, etc.  The motivation to do real-life problem solving is much higher, especially if students are involved in the process of choosing the data and collecting the data.  Databases provide teachers and students opportunities to organize documents created and data collected.  As a kindergarten teacher, my students are not independently using these 3 tools.  I strongly believe people should develop fine motor skills with handwriting.  There are exceptions, of course, I have had a student who I knew would benefit from support from an occupational therapist.  A word processor is a huge help to these students, such as mine, who need to overcome that frustration and produce written thoughts that are incredible

Using software tools in instructional shouldn’t overshadow traditional learning practices, but rather, compliment them.  I really try to integrate a form of technology in every project we work on.  As teachers we all want our students to participate on higher levels of Blooms Taxonomy than applying. Integrating software or web-based tools is an important thing to consider.  Confession time: not all of the technology used is by the students.  They use material from puzzle generators that I create. I am able to modify work for each student based on their level. For example, a couple students may complete a dot-to-dot using numbers to 10 and another group may be comepleting a dot-to-dot with numbers that skip count by 10’s to 100. This software provides room for me to accommodate all of my students needs. I use excel for data collection.  Graphic tools that my students LOVE and have produced some amazing projects with include: Graph Club and Kid Pix. For the letter of the week, students find stamps of objects that begin with the letter. When we work on patterns, students make patterns with the stamps and name them (ABAB or ABB).  My lessons plans are completed and saved through OnCourse – an on-line tool.  I share my lessons, without having to make paper copies with my co-teachers and administrator. My students love to study animals and our school bought a wonderful program called Pebble Go.  This primary web-based encyclopedia teaches students about animals in different animal groups, their habitats, babies, size, nutrition and other interesting facts.  Students often opt to go on this independently during computer lab.  We also outline and map concepts we are learning with the help of Kidspirations. While learning about animals we may complete a concept map about the way animals move and the student needs to put each animal in the correct box. You can’t get as much interest and involvement from students with a worksheet! 

A final multimedia source my class uses is PhotoStory.  At the end of each year, we reflect on the activities we do every day in kindergarten.  I ask the students what would you say if a new kindergartener asked you this summer what you do in kindergarten.  We brainstormed a list and the students choose 1 activity each (sometimes we got doubles). They draw detailed pictures of those examples.  I scan the pictures and add them to PhotoStory. I record the students describing their pictures. Then I add the story to my blog for the summer.

One of my class assignments this week was to check out the site: The Next Steps.  This site is a fabulous tool for teachers to avoid surfing the web and having to sort through the ineffective software out there.  I familiarized myself with the projects and, though I didn’t find anything that I could use for my Engaged Learning project, I did see a couple that I plan to monitor this year.  While searching the internet for other internet-based projects not mentioned on “The Next Step” I found one called “Square of Life.”  Students share living and non-living things that they find in their school yard with other participating classrooms.  The classes look for similarities and differences in the two data. Then the students prepare a final report. Although this project is not offered at the moment, I am bookmarking it.  My kindergarten classifies living and non-living objects in the Spring.  The technology tools used could include recording video, taking pictures, using multimedia sources, such as movie maker about “The Big School Yard”.  Students can write sentences (most likely not using a word processor) about same and different.  Involving a kindergartener’s surrounding world (i.e. the playground) will keep any 5 or 6 year old engaged.  With all of this in mind, I believe the LoTi level for this project would be a 4b.  Many surprises would come our way when we learn about what other kids discover at their  playgrounds.  Kids will have to consider why we did not find the same things on our playgrounds.


SQUARE OF LIFE PROJECT

Kindergarten has changed so much.  Kids are still learning basic skills, but the tools to teach them are sophisticated and encourage engaged learning.