The Importance of a Finger Space

Today in preschool we started work on our own book that mimics a book called "This is my Halloween".  It is an easy reader and we're utilizing the pattern to write similar books with words and pictures that match our own personal Halloween stories and costumes.  After reading our mentor text a few times we were ready to get started.  A mentor text is a book that does something that we want to try and do in our own writing.  "This is my ..." is the repeating phrase we'll be using within our own books about our costumes, family and traditions.  As we were working a teachable moment arose when I noticed so many books looked like this: ThisismyHalloween.  Insert a lesson about the importance of a finger space.  Here is the idea: between every word there is a space so we know the old word is over and a new one will begin.  In the beginning writing stages using a finger space, actually putting your finger down after a word and starting your new word on the other side of your finger, the space becomes a concrete part of the writing process.  Try to encourage the use of the finger space if your kids are doing any writing at home (which I highly encourage!). 

 Our work on our decodable and leveled reading books continued today with great success.  There may have even been M&M's involved.  Boy those little mini M&M's encourage kids to try sounding words out immediately instead of staring off into space.  With the little motivation I was thrilled to see the fantastic progress that the whole group is making.  Keep it up!  In fact, the progress was so awesome that I'm going to ditch the rest of the alphabet review entirely.  Expect a new calendar with updated information soon!  We finished our short unit on graphing today with a little cut and glue project and then had a blast with an introduction to making thumbprint Halloween creatures.  We'll be using thumbprint creatures for the next 3 days in our build up to Halloween.  Happy learning everyone!