Daily News!!

If you are a teacher then without question you have had those students that walk in EVERY DAY with a fun story to tell you and all their friends.  :)  And as much as you want to hear the story, if you stopped to listen to all 20 something kiddos tell you a story you'd get nothing taught!

This year my team and I were introduced to something called Daily News.  It is a form of morning message, etc. but the kiddos take ownership of it.  Basically you gather the kiddos around a piece of chart paper and call on different students to share one sentence of exciting news.  It can be from last year, last month, yesterday or tomorrow. :)  When you start this, especially with kinders, you have to MODEL MODEL MODEL what a complete sentence looks and sounds like.  But they catch on, and FAST! After the student shares their sentence, the class repeats the sentence.  I have my kiddos count with their fingers how many words are in the sentence when we repeat it.  Then, you write the sentence on the chart paper.  The kiddos always are involved in the writing.  Now, at the beginning I always wrote the sentence but the kiddos are telling me what to do.  Some things you might hear kiddos say would be: No, that should be a capital because it's a name, You forgot your period, etc.  As we move on I let the student who said the sentence write sight words (ex: the, to) to make it more interactive writing.  After the sentence is written we always count the words again to make sure we didn't forget any!  Then I take a different colored marker and ask the student who said the sentence to tell me any sight words they see.  As they identify them I circle them.  Next comes the magic. :) I ask the class "What else do you see in this sentence?"  I usually take 3-5 students to identify other things they notice.   If there are things in the sentence that I noticed and want to do a quick mini-lesson on then I do this now.  For example, if the student's sentence was: "I went to John's birthday party last weekend"  I might use this as an opportunity to introduce compound words using "birthday."  Some of the things I focus on during this time are:
         -Parts of speech: nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.
         -Compound Words
         -Verb Tenses: Past, present, future
         -Plural words
         -capitals & lowercases
         -Punctuation: exclamation points, question marks, commas, quotation marks
         -Hidden Sight Words: they LOVE LOVE this one...basically finding sight words in other words
          (ex: "to" in tomorrow)
         -and the list could go ON and ON. :)
Now we only get about 3-5 students done each day depending on our time.  I make sure that I get to each kiddo before giving another student another turn.  In fact, once each student has shared, I post our "Daily News" in the hallway.  The kiddos LOVE it!  Then when I take it down, I cut apart the sentences and each student gets to take their sentence home.  They take such ownership in this!

I will say that this is one of my FAVORITE things.  It models writing, gives a chance for meaningful mini-lessons, reinforces sight words, sentence structure, letter sounds, etc, and gives the kiddos a chance to share their exciting stories!  Some days they even ask if we can do more! :)  You can also have them do it in the mornings when they come in...that way they know what they are sharing.

Here's a picture of one of ours from last semester posted in the hallway:

Also...my FAVORITE markers of all time:

I love Mr. Sketch too...but these are SO bright and rich!

PS.  Don't forget to add your ideas to my dice game post for a {FREEBIE}!