Kindergarten Day with a Twist

About every other Friday I have "Kindergarten Day" with my groups.  I read a children's book while students sit on the floor and enjoy the story, just like Kindergarten students do.  I have them interact and participate in the process as I pause and ask them questions about the characters, or when I ask them to predict what will happen next.  I use regular children's books, or books from the Reading A-Z website. It is a paid subscription, and it is well worth it! There are books in English, French and also Spanish.  The great thing about it is that they adjust to your needs, and also are based on high frequency words! I am lucky to have a SMART board  and the Reading A-Z books have a "projectable" version that allows me to turn the page, hide text, color and/or write on the board if I want to.  Some of the books also have worksheets that are fun to use after the reading.  Before beginning the reading, I show them the cover of the book, and we try to develop as much background information about the character as possible.  This is a great review of things that they have learned, and will not be covered in the story.  It also takes them to the highest levels of the Bloom's Taxonomy, because they are applying and creating!  I write on the board what they come up with, such as name, description, family members, where does the character live (city, house/apartment, description of it etc.), hobbies, you name it! I help them by underlining words that can lead to more detail.  For example, if a student says: "she lives in a house", I underline "house", so that the next person sees that s/he can expand on that topic and add details to the house.
This time, I brought "Goyo el Pollo" (as I named it!) which is a toy that I just bought to play the "hot potato" game.  We used ten minutes to play it, and the student that "lost" had to give me background information on the character.  This was a great variation, as I saw students more engaged in the process.
After the game, I had a lot of information about the girl in the story:  family, parents' occupation, siblings, house, grandma was a millionaire because she played baseball with Felipe Alou, etc.
Then, I read the book, and did "circle"  the target structures.
After the book was read, I asked questions about the details of it, and also about the target structures to make sure they were acquired.  Then, we moved on to the worksheet.  The worksheet was very simple as it is truly for Kindergarten students, but still helped reinforced the target in a relaxed way that I realized worked as a great brain-break too!
We all had a lot of fun, learned a lot and closed our work week in a happy note.