Social Networking in Kindergarten

I chose to integrate social networking in my Kindergarten Language Arts class period today. My students don't use social networking on their own as they are not independent readers. I felt the most beneficial way to integrate social networking was to use our existing classroom FaceBook page to share our work with the parents. Since my students have been learning to identify individual phonemes, and the letters that correspond to each sound I planned a making words activity for today. During today's activity I had the students use and manipulate letter tiles in order to make words.

Here are the standards I addressed in the North Carolina Kindergarten Language Arts Standard Course of Study during this lesson:

1.02 Develop phonemic awareness and knowledge of alphabetic principle:
Demonstrate understanding that spoken language is a sequence of identifiable speech sounds.

Demonstrate understanding that the sequence of letters in the written word represents the sequence of sounds in the spoken word.

Demonstrate understanding of the sounds of letters and understanding that words begin and end alike (onsets and rimes).

1.03 Demonstrate decoding and word recognition strategies and skills:
Recognize and name upper and lower case letters of the alphabet.

Recognize some words by sight including a few common words, own name, and environmental print such as signs, labels, and trademarks.

Recognize most beginning consonant letter-sound associations in one syllable words.

At the conclusion of the lesson I expected students to be able to tap out a CVC (consonant, vowel, consonant) word saying each sound separately, and use letter tiles to correctly spell the word. In order to show mastery for this concept students will be asked to read each word that was made during the lesson.

This type of lesson or activity is one that takes place numerous times throughout the year. As the year progresses, the words get more difficult, and students work through all the short vowel sounds. For this lesson we focused on words with the short a sound.

First off, students were asked to find and put the letters; a, b, d, g, h, and p on their desk. Then I said the first word, they repeated the word back to me, tapped the sounds they hear with their fingers, and finally built the word at their seat. Then the word was written on the board, and we moved on to the next word. We did this for a total of 10 words. At the conclusion of the activity, while the students were quietly cleaning up their materials I created a word cloud on www.abcya.com. I told the students that I would be putting the image on our class Facebook page, and that if their parents were on their they could discuss the words at home.

Here’s the word cloud:


And the FaceBook post:





I think I'd do this again with the class when we move on to the other short vowel sounds. I'm hoping to get some parent responses via Facebook. I'll let you know how it goes.