Resources

When I finally realized that I wanted to be a teacher during my senior year of high school, I had no idea what it really took.  Teachers need to know a variety of ways to teach one thing—ONE THING in ONE SUBJECT.  But then after almost four years in college, I realized that I have a plethora of resources at my fingertips, including our textbook.

I constantly stress about my future classroom and if I have enough to teach them and the tools to teach them.  What if I can’t teach my students? What if I don’t have the right resources to reach my students?  I realized while I was reading, just like you will realize, don’t worry about the silly questions.  We buy $100 textbooks for a reason, most of the time, and it’s because they can give us tons of different strategies to teach and not worry.  Just for phonological awareness our textbook gave us a multitude of activities and strategies for us to use.  For explicit instruction of alphabet letters they gave us 29 different was to introduce and practice the alphabet.  For evaluating the mastery of letters, the book gave us 11 different ways.  The book gave us 9 different strategies to figure out words.

On page 145, environmental print is defined as familiar print found in the child’s surroundings.  A wonderful strategy to teach high frequency words into sight words is to create a word wall.  After many discussions in our class, I know each and every one of us will have a word wall in our classrooms.  We know that just making text into environmental print makes a different.

Another wonderful strategy that you can incorporate into your classroom that I have seen several teachers do is using a morning message. A morning message is when you and the whole class will sit in one area every single morning and post printed messages and assignments for the children.  This is a wonderful way to introduce to your children what you are learning that day, be able to answer questions for your students, and can formalize it into a lesson.

These were just a few of the strategies to help in an early childhood classroom that are so easy to incorporate into your classroom.  Don’t be like me and worry constantly! Just use your resources that you have at your fingertips.