We hope you’ve been enjoying our virtual “Walk-in-Wednesday” series on the ILS Blog! Each week, we are offering a peek from one of our teachers, highlighting what a visitor might observe when they walk into our classrooms. This series continue this week with a look into Mrs. Grace Egger’s classroom for a glimpse at some of the delightful things our Kindergarten students are doing.
Families interested in learning more about a classical, Christian education at Immanuel can join us for a Walk-in-Wednesday tour each week to observe our students and teachers in action and get a better feel for our school and our community. Upon stepping through our red doors, visitors are welcomed by the joyful sounds of learning, from poems and jingles in the lower school, to great discussions of literature and history with our upper school students. Singing and music ring out from the music room, and the wonderful sights and sounds of students and teachers engaged in learning can be witnessed throughout our campus.
Please enjoy, and join us here on our ILS Blog each week as we share additional “Walk-in-Wednesday” features! (Curious to learn more? Visit us at an upcoming ILS Admissions Open House!)
If a visitor was to walk into Kindergarten in the afternoon, she would likely find the Kindergartners in the middle of station time. Soft classical music plays in the background as the students quietly complete tasks. She sees the students spread around at different spots in the classroom, either at the desks or on rugs. Station time consists of a mixture of skill reinforcement, independent review, objectives, leisure, puzzle-solving, and reading. A visitor may see the students finishing a handwriting page at their desk, coloring a picture, or completing a task that was unfinished from earlier in the day. A student starts at his desk with a worksheet, and once he completes this first objective, he is free to move to a new objective. A visitor would see a student then go to complete activities on rugs for fine motor skill reinforcement or phonogram practice. These activities range from putting beads on pipe-cleaners, finding phonograms in books, working with pattern-blocks or geoboards, creating patterns, playing memory games, completing puzzles, forming letters and numbers with Play-Doh, and finishing other activities. Students build independence as the year progresses until they are able to move from activity to activity seamlessly, put their own puzzles and tools away, even collect the rugs and pencils and put them in their place.
Meanwhile, I am on another carpet reading with a small group of Kindergartners. The students point to the words as they read them aloud, a word, sentence, or page at a time. We may be reading Bob books if it is in the first quarter of the year. Later on, we will read Veritas Press books, Dr. Seuss stories, Little Bear, and finish the year off with Frog and Toad. As we read, I ask the Kindergartners questions—who is in this story? What is the conflict? What are our characters doing? Who can describe what is going on in this picture/chapter? Students build knowledge of phonograms, as well as the skills necessary to segment words into sounds and blend those sounds together into words. Simultaneously, students learn to understand the words they read and even form their own opinions of the stories and characters themselves. As students read, a visitor would watch the rest of the classroom rotate quietly and smoothly. The students use this time in order to leisurely, and yet diligently, complete tasks and reinforce skills.
