| Kindergarten Mini Office |
| During writing workshop, when students are writing in their journals, they often have a teacher made mini office in front of them. The mini-office provides a tool for children to use to help them write and teaches them to look for resources while writing. Our Scarbro Kindergarten mini office shows high frequency words, numbers, colors, and a chart to teach letter formation. Materials: * two colored file folders for each office * clear packaging tape * alphabets, pictures, numbers, word wall words, etc. * laminating film and machine * markers, rubber cement or glue stick, and scissors. Procedure: 1. Lay the file folder face down on a table, sides touching, folders opened. 2. Tape the sides together using clear packaging tape. 3. Now the fun begins! Personalize your mini office to meet the needs of your students. Use a program such as Print Shop or any word processing program to create colorful skills charts. If you don't have access to a computer and a color printer, you could use stickers or coloring books. 4. Glue the charts onto the folders. Add stickers or pictures to jazz them up a little! 5. Lamintate. Our students are taught that a good writer knows where to find the tools they need. This is the goal of using a mini-office. Below are some samples of our journals and the Scarbro Kindergarten mini-office we use at Almost Heaven Kindergarten. |
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| Pictured on the left is a sample page from a student's journal. We make our class journals by binding several pieces of white paper together using our school's book binder. A line is drawn across the middle of the page to separate text and illustrations. At the beginning of the year, we place a sticker on the top left part of the text portion of the page to show where writing begins. This picture was taken in February and we are now pretty good at writing from left to right, so we don't need the sticker prompt anymore! |
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| Pictured on the left is a sample page from a student's journal. Writers are encouraged to make sure their picture matches their text, and that they have written words, letter marks or magic lines for each word of their story. This student has a drawn lines for the words she wants to write. The she writes - I have a pretty bear that my daddy got me when I was at the hospit ! " Wow... Kiss your brain... good job! " |
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| Other pages of our mini-office have: number and color words, names of classmates, seasonal words, left and right hands, and number lines. You can download mini-office templates at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/KinderKorner/files/Mini-Office/ |
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| Bear Number Line with number words. |
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| Before Nick writes, he thinks about his story and visualizes what it will look like. |
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| Author's Chair We share our stories as we sit in our Author's Chair. A child's size plastic chair is covered with a special sheet of fabric to make our Author's Chair. |