Community Helpers Unit

Candlelit (led candle)
restaurant with waiter and
customer play scripts. 

Fire engine: made with red tri-fold display
board and a large cardboard box.

Community Helpers hats and coats

Doctor's/Vet's Office: X-rays from
an animal book, vision chart, play script,
telephone, and play medical instruments.

We began the unit with a puppet show for the kids! I made sure to include several community helpers in the script (see below), but no more than two characters were needed at once, so myself and one of the Educational Assistants performed the show together. I also created a slide show with backgrounds that went with each scene and asked students to play different parts of the script. Kids took turns coming up to the board, acting and saying their lines.

Puppet Show Script:

Built-in Literacy Opportunities

Sentence Strips: Students are able to easily manipulate these sentences by moving the words and pictures around. They enjoyed practicing reading using a pointer. The strip chart was conveniently located in play area where kids feel most comfortable.

WH- Questions Flip Chart: I assigned different students to the Read with Teacher area where we practiced answering Who, What, and Where questions. For example: Who fights fires? What vehicle do policemen drive? and Where do  teachers work? etc. 

Word Wall: We tried to include photos of community helpers of different genders and ethnicities (except for the teacher, I used my photo for that one) 

Writing: Students used pretend registration sheets at the doctor's/vet office, they wrote patient names, their symptoms and other information. I modeled writing during circle and made sure to remind students that writing can look like squiggling or random letters, and not everyone is able to write like a "big kid. 

Lakes and Ponds Unit

Here in beautiful Western Washington, we are surrounded by a lot of wetlands and the wildlife that resides there. This is why we (myself and the other teacher, AKA my partner in crime) decided to teach a unit that focuses specifically on ponds and lakes. 

Each of the four weeks of the unit was dedicated to a different animal. These included frog, duck, turtle and beaver. We read different books about these animals and ponds, created crafts which represent them, and sang songs about ponds. Plants like lily pads and cattails were also discussed.  As part of the unit, we visited a local lake park where students participated in a scavenger hunt. We had some real life cattail plants and lily pads for students to look at and feel. 

Literacy for the Unit

Writing Center: pond word tracing,
frog to lily pad tracing and cutting, frog and turtle coloring. 

Circle: Word Wall

Play Area: Students have the opportunity
to practice sight words during free play .

1-to-1 word correspondence: Students learn that
each spoken words corresponds to a written word.
Kids also practiced listening for beginning
sounds in order to figure out which sentence
 each animal went with.

Writing Centers

Each session of preschool (AM and PM) in my district are two and a half hours long, which makes it difficult for literacy instruction to take place on daily basis. However, during one of the district literacy training sessions with Vicki Rothstein this year a Four Blocks Approach to literacy was discussed and, despite having heard of it in the past, I was suddenly inspired to create literacy centers in my classroom incorporating all of the "blocks".

My centers include: Reading to self or Quiet Reading, Writing Center, Read with Teacher (I often use adapted book or activities with students at this center), and Phonemic Awareness activities including beginning sounds games, rhyming, syllable counting practice, etc. (on the rug). I taught my students to check which center they are assigned to by looking at this visual board:

Student names are written on clothing pins and their photos are attached with Velcro. AM session student names are on one side of the pin and PM session names are on the other.

Writing Center has a miniature word wall, unit related writing prompts or ideas, step-by-step directions (some of my students absolutely adore these!), and a little drawer box with labeled writing supplies.

I got the idea of organizing the centers visually from Developing Literacy in Preschool (Tools for Teaching Literacy) by Lesley Mandel Morrow. 

Have you found good strategies to teach literacy to ECE students? Please share!