You Will Shine With These
Kindergarten Teaching Strategies!!

Although kindergarten teaching is not my forte, I have recently consulted with a very good friend and teaching colleague, Valerie, who has been teaching kindergarten for many, many, many years.

I consider Valerie to be an expert in teaching kindergarten and that's why I asked her for some of her teaching strategies.

She has given me some excellent suggestions and tips on the kindergarten games, resources and practices that have helped her a great deal.

Her teaching strategies have allowed her to develop oral language, listening skills, reading skills (letter recognition and sound)and writing skills (letters of the alphabet, words and sentences) in her kindergarten program.

I'm sure that you will find them very helpful and effective as well.

One major focus is Literacy, which includes kindergarten alphabet activities . Be sure to read about the successful activities she used, by clicking on the link above.

Another consideration when kindergarten teaching is that there are no textbooks to follow per say, so particular resources or book clubs are essential.

In Valerie's kindergarten class, each month the children participate in a Scholastic Book Club program, where students are given the opportunity to purchase books geared to their interests.

This is a great way of building a love of reading and developing their own home library.

Teachers who participate in this program are also able to order books (for free) depending on the total student amount.

Valerie has built up a huge library of books over the years that she reads daily to the children.

Several other resources that she has found useful include:

* From Scholastic - a resource on teaching strategies called "Reading and Writing in Kindergarten" - A Practical Guide.

* From Nelson - an interesting resource entitled "Kindergarten Teacher's Resource Book".

* A fabulous book that Valerie relies heavily on, entitled "1001 Rhymes and Fingerplays", compiled by The Totline Staff, Illustrated by Gary Mohrmann.

This book provides interesting fingerplays on a variety of subject areas/themes/special occasions. These fingerplays are great for promoting oral language, listening skills, choral reading, discussions, etc.

* Another great book called "Higglety Pigglety" - A Book of Rhymes", by Houghton Mifflin.

It has a variety of appealing poems for kindergarten children; poems for all seasons/occasions. Some poems are traditional nursery rhymes.

Further to developing literacy when kindergarten teaching, Valerie has her students keep a journal.

She uses this mainly to develop the oral language skills for the Junior Kindergartens and the writing skills for the Senior Kindergartens.

Journal entries are usually based on a response to a picture that they have drawn or to a special occasion/theme/concept.

After the students have done a journal entry, she works with them on a one-to-one basis to write a sentence about their picture.

You can really see the skill development, especially in the Senior students.

The conferencing time allows her to understand the child's needs and strengths as far as their writing skills go.

When needed, she works with them directly to spell a word (for example, by sounding out the letters), and to provide capitals/punctuation.

Please read my page kindergarten ideas to get more great teaching strategies on various aspects of teaching kindergarten that you may want to incorporate into your kindergarten teaching program.

Also be sure to read my page on kindergarten lessons to get more valuable teaching strategies on numeracy/mathematics, oral language and literacy.

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