Ideas

These pictures show some of the ideas I have used in my classroom with my ELL Kindergarten students. I try to create fun activities to help my students learn sight words, alphabet knowledge, and reading skills.

I used these beach balls to write sight words that we were studying. When we have a few extra minutes, we play "Sight Word Ball". I throw the ball to a student and when they catch it, I tell them a color. They have to read the word written in the color section. They then get to throw it to someone else and tell them a color to read.



This is a picture of my classroom word wall. Each of the sight words under the letters are color coded. This helps my students find the words. The colors are especially beneficial for my students who are not yet able to read all of the words. When they ask for a word, I tell them the beginning letter and the color of the word. The words are on the board with magnets so the students can use them when needed for writing, literacy center activities, and/or games.



These are books and puppets that the students use in our thematic unit center. As our themes change throughout the year, so do the books and puppets. My students love to get a puppet to "read" to, or they use the puppets to act out the stories with each other. Even my students who were in the silent stage, at the beginning of school, would "talk" through the puppets. It is a favorite activity in our classroom.

This is a picture of the puppet curtain where the students do their puppet shows. This is a picture of Twister Bingo. I used an old Twister mat and wrote a sight word on each circle. The students walk around the mat while music is playing. When the music stops, they choose a word on which to stand. I use sight word cards to hold up for the students to read. If I hold up their word, they have to sit down. The last player standing is the winner. I let them play in their sock feet, so this is a favorite game in my room!

This game is called "Pop". We have several in our classroom. I used popcorn shaped cut outs and a popcorn box. This game focuses on sight words, but I have also made them for numerals, color words, students names, and shapes. We pass around the popcorn box and a student pulls out a piece of popcorn. If they can read the word, we put it in the middle and keep going until someone pulls out "Pop". If that happens, all the pieces go back in the box and we start over. The object of the game is to get all of the pieces out of the box before getting "Popped". Other variations I have made are "Crash" with car cut outs and "Ribbit" with frog cutouts.

These are my alphabet tubs. I gathered objects for each letter of the alphabet into a separate tub. These are also available from various school supply stores. We use these tubs all year long. In the beginning of the year, we use them for learning beginning sounds and for matching objects to letter sounds. As the year progresses, we use them for matching rhyming sounds and ending sounds. I also let the students pick objects to write about from the tubs.