Disciplinary Literacy with Narwhals & more Differentiation

    As I spoke about in the last entry, the kindergarteners are writing about Narwhals. The teacher read a book to the class that had text more complex than their reading level. She helped liven up the information by having the students act out some of the vocabulary and facts as they learned. The students also had the chance to watch a video about Narwhals. 

"For students who are English language learners or those who require differentiation, completed outlines and organizers provide additional support for success (Kopp, 201)."

"Regardless of the writing assignment science teachers require of their students, they will, along with their language counterparts, hold students accountable for the Common Core English Language Arts Writing Standards (ibid)."

    It is not too early in kindergarten to start learning to encode (spell) words correctly and use basic mechanics when writing about what they learned, so together as a class, the students helped Ms. V put into print the sentences they had created in picture form. This sentence tells about the Narwhals' diet.

   

    Since this was the third time the children were beginning a sentence with the word Narwhals, they had begun with an uppercase letter n. Spelling eat was tricky. They are just beginning to learn to use long vowel sounds. As the children sounded out eat, it went from using one letter e to the correct spelling after a student correctly spelled it. The child said she knew eat is spelled that way because her mom told her so. (Great memory!) Ms. V showed the children that ea can also make a long a sound, as well as a short e sound. 

Here, Ms. V had children use their background knowledge from a book they had read, to talk about making a list. She showed them how the way to make a list in a sentence is different than the checklist from the book. She told how we separate the items with a comma.  

Encoding the word squid was challenging. Students thought about the hard sound that comes after the s. The c  was chosen. That spelling would be acceptable for kindergarten spelling since all of those sounds are found in the word, but Ms. V probed further.

Here, Ms. V asked the children to help her stretch-out the word squid and she mad a line under each letter as they said the sounds. That's when students realized they heard the /kw/ sound and replaced the c with a q.

Ms. V probed a little more to help the children notice that a letter was still missing from squid.  The reason she didn't just tell what the missing letter was is that for the majority of the 100+ days we have been in kindergarten, the children have recited, "Q is always followed by a u, because they are best friends!" The best friends part is always emphasized by the children crossing their index and middle fingers to shake them in front of themselves as they recite those words. Eventually, a student gave the correct spelling of squid and stated the letter rule to back up his choice.

Here are the children rehearsing while reviewing the picture sentence: Narwhals live in the icy cold waters of the Arctic.

Narwhals ( They make a tusk.)

live (They form a roof.)

in the icy cold waters (They hug themselves and move their hands as if shivering)

of the Arctic (They arc their hand over their head to indicate the top of the earth.).

Doing research on Narwhals by watching a video.

Below are a few pictures  of ways students have some variety while learning.

The 3 tables can be use individually, be rearranged to make a circle table, or the semicircle and the retangular piece can be used as a table depending on how many students need to be seated together.