Visualizing in Reading Workshop

Visualizing is such a crucial part to reading and writing. We started our lesson by talking about what it meant to visualize. I had my anchor chart ready to give my students a visual.

I then had them close their eyes as I described an object. I gave them adjectives like orange, round, green stem, ridges. I had them turn to their partners and talk about what they saw in their minds. You guessed it, I was describing a pumpkin! They had so much fun doing this, and saw how easy it was to visualize in their minds.

We then read the poem "Green Giant" and read it over and over again (oh, kindergarten!). You can grab the poem here or here! After we read the poem, we visualized what the giant looked like in our minds. The next day, we went to the drawing board and began to draw the giant that we visualized! I was so amazed by how their giants turned out. It was such a great indication of who could visualize, who needed some extra support, and who did not understand the concept at all. Below are some examples:

I even had a student label the parts of her giant! It is such a satisfying feeling to see your students start to become independent with the skills you have taught them!

Sensory Rice

I am so so excited to introduce my class to sensory rice! I have been wanting to do this forever, and thanks to a day off in the middle of the week, I gathered all the supplies and made the rice! Thank you to especiallyeducation.com for the easy DIY steps!

First, I bought all the materials:

• food coloring
• zip lock bags (gallon size)
• a bag of rice (depending on how much rice you want, this will vary. I bought a 10 lb bag, but I definitely need more!)
• isopropyl alcohol

Next, I placed the rice into gallon bags. Do one bag for each color you want to make.

Then, I squeezed in the food coloring and the alcohol (about 1 1/2 tablespoons for each bag). I used one whole tube. You can use more tubes if you want the rice to be a brighter color.

After the food coloring and alcohol were in the bags, I squished the bags around to spread out the color. As you can see, my mom really enjoyed this part!

Finally, I poured each bag into and aluminum throw away pan, and left them outside to dry. I left mine out to dry all day and night.

And boom! You have sensory rice for your kiddos to explore!

There are many ways you can use sensory rice in your classroom. To start easy, I mixed in magnet letters and had children sift through the rice to find certain letters. Once they found the letter, they had to match it to the correct letter on their alphabet chart. You can also put various objects in the rice, and have students pull out all the objects that start with a certain letter. There are so many possibilities! Enjoy!