End of the Year Activities

If you teach K-2nd, you know that you have a certain amount of minutes dedicated to each subject. Yet the increasing rigor in the standards require kindergarten teachers to have their class reading by the end of the year. So, we find ways to incorporate ELA skills into content areas while still teaching content area standards. We hope our kindergarten science units have some grade level text. How can we incorporate ELA into science units successfullly? Here are 3 steps you can take:

1. Find grade level text that talks about what you're teaching. Some good resources are Reading A-Z. While most of their books don't directly address the Kindergarten Science Curriculum, they do contain certain science themes appropriate for kindergarten. This water clarity reader, this weather reader, and this "how objects move" science predictable reader meet the Texas

kinder TEKS. They include a predictable reader and a video that reads the book aloud to be used for a shared reading. Each reader also comes with an interactive notebook activity appropraite for kindergarten. These will soon be a part of a bundle, and were designed as a way to add rigor to your science lesson plans.

Whichever resource you choose, you can have it available after your science unit is complete. It can be put in your science center, or in children's book boxes, depending on what their independent reading level is.

2. Follow a 5E lesson plan. (Engage, explore, explain, elaborate, evaluate). If you follow this format for math and science, you will more than likely have to find text to go with the "explain" portion of your lesson. This builds in the reading component in  your science lesson for kindergarten. It serves as your reminder when you're lesson planning, to incorporate some sort of grade level text. Sometimes you'll be able to fit in the kindergarten science text to the "elaborate" portion as well! In the "explain" or "elaborate" portion of your lesson you can also incorporate a written response, which brings me to my next point...

3. Incorporate a written response or reflection at some point in your lesson. If you're doing a

science experiment with your kindergarten students that day, you could have them write their prediction right before you've told them the experiment and they're excited about it. If you've just explored hands on materials for a lesson you're teaching, take the time to have them reflect. First they tell their impressions to a buddy (as a pre-writing activity). Then have them go to their seat and quietly reflect in their science interactive notebook about their findings. The aforementioned Kindergarten Science Units are a great way to do this. Each lesson contains an interactive notebook activity appropriate for kindergarten students. 

4. Make sure you have a content area word bank and post the unit's vocabulary on it. Vocabulary is so important! So many of our students come to school with a very limited knowledge of academic vocabulary. Having a word bank in your classroom for each content area not only gives students a visual, but also helps you (the teacher) incorporate this vocabulary into the lesson. You can refer to your word bank throughout your lesson for students to have a better understanding of what you're talking about (especially if the word bank includes images or non-verbal representations of the meanings of words). Below you can see an example of some vocabulary cards that would be perfect for a kindergarten science word bank.