Making Words

Hello and happy Sunday!!!

I want to tell you today about a sweet activity I do once a week (on Fridays) in my classroom - Making Words!

I first learned about Making Words when I was doing a clinical in a third grade classroom. My cooperating teacher did the activity once a week and I really loved it so I decided to do it in my own classroom!

If you aren't familiar with this situation, here is the scoop. Every student gets a worksheet with 5-6 letters on the top of it in boxes. They cut out the boxes and then I call out words for them to make with their letters! Typically, each week has one or two word families that they're working with. This week I think it was -an and -ack maybe? Anyway, as you can see in the picture, the words start easy - "an", for example. As you move on, they get a little more complicated - beginning blends, digraphs, what have you.

I love this activity for several reasons, and here they are!

1. It gives all of my students a chance to practice decoding, encoding, and reading skills in a low-stress environment. Their affective filter is low, so to speak, because they are doing the activity in a large group and can lean toward a friend if they need a little help.
2. The kids LOVE coming in the front of the room to make the words. As you can see in the picture, I have magnetic letters that I use to have the kids demonstrate the correct spelling.
3. The activity is differentiated in and of itself. The "easier" words are challenging for my low first graders, and the harder words are just right for my second graders. I can call on lower students to show the first few words and I can call on higher students for the last few. Nobody has any idea that I am handpicking the kids for certain words... :)
4. It is great for kinesthetic learners! They get to manipulate the letters on their desks AND on the board if they get called up! It hits visual and auditory as well - the visual learners SEE the letter magnets on the board, and the auditory learners HEAR us spell it together out loud!
5. It touches on vocabulary if they give you some weird words to make!
6. It gives some of my students some MUCH NEEDED cutting practice. That's all I have to say about that......

I bought a book to just print the pages out of. Here is what I have (except I have the first grade version...).

There is probably a new or updated version without a lady in a denim jumper on the front but whatevs. :)

You can also make your own letters and lists of words if you are focusing on a specific word family or spelling pattern for the week.

Yay for Making Words!

Monday Made It: Bead Slides

It's Monday! Two more days until I can get back into school to start setting up and I am SO PUMPED! Also I'm excited because it is Monday Made It day again!

This Monday, I made bead slides to use for phonemic awareness activities!

I read about bead slides from Katie at Two Can Do It who originally read about it from Julie at Make, Take & Teach!

You use bead slides to help students learn how to segment phonemes. As you may know, phonemic awareness is important because children's level of phonemic awareness is highly correlated with their success in beginning reading! (I feel like I should put an in-text citation here, haha.) Anyway, when you're asking a student to segment phonemes, you would give them a word like "book." If they are comfortable with this skill, they would be able to tell you that the sounds in book are: b-oo-k. 3 sounds - 3 phonemes!

Bead slides just give students extra kinesthetic support so they can build this SUPER IMPORTANT skill!  They move a bead with each sound that they say.

Anyway, let me tell you how to make them. :)

You'll need...

• regular flat shoelaces. I bought 54" shoelaces from Target. They were about $2 a pack, and I was able to make 12 bead slides using one pack of shoelaces (6 on each lace).
• beads. I got mine at Hobby Lobby for about $2.50. You could actually use pony beads if you want, you just want to make sure that the holes aren't too big so there is some resistance when you move the  beads up and down the shoelace.

Then you're ready to start!

You'll want to put groups of 6 beads onto the shoelaces and tie off about 5-6" inch sections for each bead slide. Here's a picture to show you what I mean.

After you have put on your beads and tied off each section, cut in between the knots and you will have your bead slides!

If you use Michael Heggerty's phonemic awareness book, you could absolutely use these for the segmenting and blending portions of the daily routines!

Julie at Make, Take & Teach has a video about bead slides as well as extra resources to use these! :)

Bead slides are fun to play with, too, so if you don't teach phoneme segmentation, you could easily use these as fidgets in your classroom!

Monday Made It: Contraction Shakers!

Happy Monday! Today marks the first day of my sailing lessons!!! I hope I don't regret this adventure... I'll let you all know tomorrow. :)

Time for Monday Made It, yeah!

Here is what I made this week: contraction shakers!!!!!!!!

This idea has been cooking in my brain for a while, and I had the empty bottle collection to prove it. :) A while back, Denise at Sunny Days in Second Grade posted about her synonym shakers, and I was totally in love with them! I knew my class would for sure love them, too.

Our reading series puts a TON of emphasis on contractions, and for some reason my class was really into them this past year, so I decided to make contraction shakers!

And you can make them, too!! I put my word lists and labels into a little document-o for ya.

When I looked up the Common Core standard for this activity, I noticed that it did not exist in the first grade set. So, question for you today: in which grade does your school teach contractions?

I teach one set of contractions in first grade in the fall and then the other set in the spring.

How about you?

Beginnings and Endings

Before I forget, I want to share this AMAZING video with you all. Some of my kids were singing this today and I thought they made it up. I was so wrong!

Is your class obsessed with Sexy and I Know It? Mine is..... not appropriate....

Today I had a pop-in! It shouldn't have been a pop-in but I forgot that the assistant superintendent of our diocese was coming by today. Luckily I had something pretty sweet going on at the time!

In second grade, we've been learning random prefixes and suffixes over the course of the year. Do you typically do a whole prefix/suffix unit or something? Mine are just thrown in wherever.

Anyway, we played a little beginnings and endings game today. They got into teams and had to brainstorm words with a specific prefix or suffix for 2 minutes at a time. After 2 minutes, we came back together and read off our words like Scattergories, so a team only got a point if the other team didn't have the same word. I was the judge of made-up words, such as "loveful." My favorite word they came up with was "refinance" for the re- part of the game, haha! We also learned that "rerase" is not a word... life lessons.

They were REALLY into it! It was a near perfect pop-in lesson besides the extreme competitiveness that was exhibited. It's amazing how loud 5 second-graders can get... but at least they were yelling about literacy... right?

Would You Care for a Pair of Pears?

Hi friends!

How was your Monday? Mine was pretty good! Less stressful than a normal Monday, so I feel good about that. :)

I have had this idea brewing in my mind for about a month now, and on Mondays I have about 2.5 hours of uninterrupted time with the kids, so it finally came to fruition today!

Around Christmas, we learned about homonyms in second grade. The first graders overheard the lessons and since then I think I've heard someone come up with a homonym pair every day. I even heard one in Spanish - adiós like goodbye, and a Dios, like to God!

So today, we brainstormed tons of homonym pairs and then got to work illustrating them!

Roll like bread, and roll like rolling a bowling ball!

Horse like an animal, and hoarse like when your throat is sore! This illustration is based on a true story.... you may be able to see that this illustrated person is "tossing its cookies", so to speak. We had a vomiting incident at Mass on Friday... yeah...

I even made the pear template into a PDF for you if you want to do this activity too!!! This is the first thing I am sharing and even though it is really nothing major, I am psyched. Click on the little preview to go!

And lastly, holy moly, I was tagged in question things four times. So I will just add my answers to the bottom of my posts for the next 4 days!! :) I'm not going to share 12 things about me because I think I have already shared like 24 things about me and I can't think of any more random trivia!! Sorry!

First, Chrissy's questions from Buzzing with Ms. B!

1. What is the best part of teaching? I think the best part of teaching is that I have a fun job and I get to spend like 6 hours a day with hilarious little kids. I also love when they learn something TOTALLY new to them and they feel so smart!!
2. What's your favorite holiday? Hmmm... I think Christmas. I like seeing my fam and it's fun to give and get presents. Today we listened to Silent Night in my class because our Religion lesson today was The First Christmas, haha.
3. Who is your best friend and why? Besides my boyfriend... my best friend's name is Nicole! She and I met at Bradley and then we both transferred to NIU and graduated from there. We were roommates for two years and really we were great together! We had a lot of fun. Now that we are grown-ups, she is always there for me even though she is in the western suburbs, 90 minutes away!
4. What did you want to be when you were a kid? In Kindergarten, I wanted to be a ballerina. Since then I've wanted to be a teacher. :)
5. What's your favorite outfit? I really love wearing leggings but I hardly do... so I will say this teal sweater dress things I have and my black leggings and boots!!
6. What's your favorite breakfast? I love sausage burritos from McDonald's, but I also love when my boyfriend makes me scrambled eggs with cheese or a cheese omelet! Yum, eggs and cheese.
7. What's your favorite TV show of all time? I love Seinfeld! I also love The Office and lately I have been getting into 30 Rock.
8. What weird habit or behavior did you have as a kid? I am a big explainer/justifier... I will try to explain away everything. As a kid, I would make up stories for things I didn't understand. For example, I told myself that stoplights took so long to change because there were little men under the street who had strings they would pull to change the lights. The strings were really heavy so it would take forever to pull them all the way down; that's why you had to wait so long. I have a good imagination.
9. Siblings? How many? I have two half-brothers and a half-sister, and then one regular brother. My dad was married before and my half-siblings are 20ish years older than me. My brother is two years younger than me.
10. Beatles or Elvis? I will say Beatles. My boyfriend's fam is in love with them.
11. Beach or mountains? I live near neither. I've never been to the mountains and I guess I don't really care to, so the beach!!
12. What's the BEST trip you've ever taken? I went to a few weddings of my cousins' in the San Diego area and it made me want to marry California. I also went to visit a friend of mine in New York City and I loved it there too!! 

Ay yi yi. One set down, three to go! By the end, you will know way too much about me. :)

December Currently!

I'm so happy the December Currently is here!!

This past week was our Gingerbread Week. We read 5 different gingerbread stories, compared and contrasted them, and did a few fun activities. Here is our CLAPS (Characters, Location, Action, Problem, Solution) chart which helped us compare each of the stories throughout the week.

As you can see, we read The Gingerbread Man, The Gingerbread Girl, Gingerbread Baby, The Musubi Man, and the Cajun Cornbread Boy.

They ALL loved Gingerbread Baby the best!

We made the gingerbread glyphs that I got from Denise at Sunny Days in Second Grade!

We also did a ginger taste test graphing activity which I got from Tales of a Teacherista! I didn't get any pictures of the actual tasting, but the kids loved it. We tried ginger ale, gingerbread flavored marshmallows, and ginger snaps. They could not get enough ginger ale!!!! And they detested the ginger snaps. We had fun. :)

Unrelated to gingerbread, we made new window decorations. I think 3 months was long enough to leave up our apples, right? We made Christmas-themed tissue paper/contact paper things this time.

Okay, go link up with Farley!

Reading Rods

This week, I received a Reading Rods kit that I won because I follow ETA/Cuisenaire on facebook!!!

This wasn't the first thing I've won from them, which is crazy because I never win any blog giveaways!! In the summer, they gave away a starter kit of mini VersaTiles cases, which I also won. Then my kids destroyed them.

Well, not really, but we are missing some tiles which is pretty annoying.

Anyway, my box came in the mail on Tuesday, but I went home sick that day because I had some kind of 24-hour-flu! So on Thursday, I debuted the reading rods to my first graders and we did the first activity flipbook page together.

They looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooove these!! They love the colors and that they fit together! And that they can make words by themselves!

I am definitely going to integrate this into my regular reading instruction. I couldn't believe they gave me ALL this stuff!! An entire instructional guide and two flipbooks!! Wow!! 

My reading program is totally hands-off and very boring. I have a sad feeling that I'm raising a group of people who aren't going to like reading - except for one of my first grade girls, who reads at a level M! And she is only 5; she's supposed to be in Kindergarten!!!!!!

I am hoping and praying that reading rods will turn our literacy lives around. :) Do you use them?

My First Open House

Last night was the Open House for my school! I was super nervous although I had met a few families previously, but everything went very well!

Out of my 12 kiddos, 8 families came! They were all very positive and excited about the room, and I got a lot of compliments on my BEE binders. I first heard about using them when I volunteered in a classroom in my old elementary school, and I loved how consolidated everything was. I took a copy of the BEE Binder explanation page to every interview I went on because I was so into it! So I was happy to know that the parents loved it too. :)

The morning of Open House I kind of panicked because I realized that I didn't have a whole lot of student work up... I mean, I have my Bravo board (thanks, The First Grade Parade!) and my little name mosaics outside, but I felt that it was a little devoid of other stuff. So in an attempt to clean out that black file cabinet you see in the corner, I found this OLD book about making cards with kids. The card designs were incredibly complicated and ridiculous, but I did find this pattern for a spiral card for Mother's Day, which I adapted to our mini science unit on hurricanes. After we studied hurricanes, talked about Hurricane Irene, watched a few hurricane informational and footage videos, and I ensured the kids a hundred times that we definitely will not have a hurricane, even though there are lakes nearby, the kids wrote facts about hurricanes on their spiral cards, backed them with construction paper, and cut them out. The kids loved them and they were SUPER excited to show their parents! Since they did it earlier in the day, they still remembered what they wrote... so I guess my procrastination paid off. ;) Here's a close-up. They turned out well!

As part of our mini hurricane unit, we also acted out a hurricane.... because I don't know about other first grade classes, but my students NEED brain breaks like every 5 minutes! This was a good way to get them up and moving. And it reinforced the idea of the eye of the hurricane!

And then here's just some other stuff that I wanted to show! First, my "about me" board featuring my new sign from Miss Kindergarten's Etsy shop!! My girls just LOVE it and they keep drawing peace signs on everything. I'll add some more stuff as the year goes on but I think this is pretty good to start.

I don't think that I posted my jobs board yet. I got the sign from One Extra Degree and just printed it on bright paper. Then, I borrowed Mrs. Lemons's idea of using library pockets for my jobs and I just cut up cardstock and wrote their names. I haven't switched jobs yet, but I think I will on Monday. Some of the kids' jobs are kind of lame... I didn't realize that until after we started school. This is featured on the lovely side of my huge desk!

And, lastly, I dipped my little toe into the Reader's Workshop idea today inspired by the awesome Debbie Miller. Have you read City Dog, Country Frog yet? It's by my bff (in my dreams), Mo Willems.

If you haven't read it, let me summarize - a dog and a frog meet up once a season and they just do their thing, playing around outside. When winter comes, the dog can't find the frog, and when spring comes around, the frog is still "missing" ... but the dog finds a new friend. It's a pretty heavy book, and I wasn't sure if my students would understand, but I had one friend who called out, "The frog's dead, you guys" when we were towards the end.

So, since we technically don't know what happened to the frog, we inferred together about what could have happened and why we think that - what evidence from the book or schema from our brains did we use to make those inferences? I was SUPER SUPER proud of my students for being so thoughtful! They came up with some really great ideas and some interesting ones, but they definitely were all thinking hard, so I had them kiss their brains. They just looooove that! :)

So that wraps it up! Thanks for sticking around until the end. :)