Great ideas from TR today

Record students' use of literacy, language, communication skills in a checklist.
Check literacy objectives to get information for the checklists.
Fabulous guidance couselor said she'd seen kiddos make a recipe book at another school and said she'd bring it in for me to see.
Very excited!

name practice

the same day as the fire incident i was picking up scraps of paper in the house keeping center and i noticed that most of them had the same set of letters scribbled on them. adnerb. brenda. this little one came in unable to write her name, unable to identify any numbers in her name, or recognize her name. she was spending her house keeping center play time practicing writing her name, over and over again. i'm not sure if it was a part of play and she was "signing" her recipes for the cash register, or if she just suddenly decided to practice. (or if she wanted to write and those were the only letters she knew).
whatever it was, i'm glad she had paper and pencil available to her.

acting and writing

one one of the last days of school before break (when the last thing i possibly wanted to do was play house with loud kindergarten kiddos) i walked by house keeping center and one friend excitedly asked me to participate.
"Help! There's a fire! Come put it out fire-fighter lipstick!"

how could i refuse?

immediately after we had acted out putting out the fire and rebuilding the restaurant i suggested to my imaginative friend that we write a book about it. he was surprisingly excited and we sat down to re-create the story. he did the pictures and i did the writing and then he put the pages in order so they made sense. it was a brilliant story with dialogue and as soon as i get a picture of it i'll put it up.

hooray for writing about imaginary play!