Writers Workshop Curriculum K-1 | Writing Through the Year™ BUNDLE Writers Workshop is a wonderful way to incorporate all of the ELA standards while introducing your students to the love of writing. Writing Through the Year™ was created by two kindergarten teachers with over 20 years of classroom experience and it will save you hours each month in writing lesson plans. Each writing lesson has been classroom tested and student approved. Students will be encouraged and guided as ... continue reading...
Search Results for: label/spelling chunks
Engaging Readers, Curriculum Maps and FREE five-day lesson plan
Curriculum Maps for Kindergarten and First Grade help to guide your classroom instruction through your whole year! Reading, Math, Writing and MORE! Plus a free file for you! We have a whole series of Engaging Readers units out. The units cover phonemic awareness, phonics, and Comprehension skills. Here are a few pictures that Stephanie Stewart shared with me from the April unit. Sequencing the picture cards for the story, Piggie Pie. Checking her notebook with the class chart to see ... continue reading...
Zoo unit Day 1 Giraffes
I LOVE this time of year. My little sweeties are becoming independent thinkers and learners who have blossomed into readers and writers AND all of my Favorite units are in the Spring!! Zoo animals, Dinosaurs (my fave), and Insects (my fave), What???!! I can have more than one favorite! :) I spend two weeks on each of these units. There is just something about these topics that get kids super excited about learning! Today we learned all about Giraffes. ... continue reading...
America Unit Part One
I love how cute the bald eagles turned out! This is a picture of our Chit-Chit message. These messages are how I teach and review phonics, reading and language skills. There is no better way to teach letter sounds and sound chunks than in the context of authentic reading and writing. We read a sentence just as it is written and then use our schema and other context clues to help us figure out what would make sense in the sentence. Once we think we have it figured ... continue reading...
Snowman Fun!
We only had a four day week because Monday was a teacher work day. The kids were so excited to be back and we had lots of fun with snowmen. I kept forgetting to take my camera to school. GRRRRR! I get so aggravated when I do that! Here are some of the things we did that I took a picture of. We read the book from my Snowman unit and circled the popcorn words and looked for chunks in words. We read the story, Snowmen All Year and did a directed drawing and painted snowmen. ... continue reading...
Teaching Phonological Awareness | Blending Sounds
Blending sounds activities. Here are some fun phonological awareness activities you can do with your students in small group, as a student center, or as an intervention. See how we teach students onset and rime, too! Blending Sounds Activities It is an exciting time in the classroom when our students start blending sounds! But how do we get there? Daily instruction in phonological awareness, of course! Here are some great, sound blending activities from the Phonological & ... continue reading...
Literacy Centers Part Three Big Book Station and ABC center FREEBIES
Kids love Shared Reading time. There's just something about being actively involved in reading a story that you love. Each week I introduce a new big book. We spend a week reading the book, closely analyzing the text and getting to know the characters. Joy Cowley is one of our favorite authors. After we've spent a week on a big book I don't just put it away and forget about it. The big book joins all of the other big books in the big book center so that the Littles can ... continue reading...
Guided Reading! Getting Organized
Getting organized for guided reading can be a challenge. In order for it to be effective, you need to keep your resources handy and all together. So I like to keep my guided reading books and lessons together in individual binders. Each binder is organized by level. and having the spine labeled helps to find the resource I need in seconds! Inside the binder is where a disaster can happen if you are not mindful! Right inside the cover is where I put the sound boxes. I slide ... continue reading...
Name Activities for Early Learners
Carol Lyons once said, “The most powerful and effective way for children to begin learning the complex process of learning about letters is by working with their own names." This quote does an incredible job of explaining how important one's name is. When meeting students for the first time, one of the first questions asked is, “What’s your name?” Teachers work so hard to remember all of the names as quickly as possible. This shows teachers care about them for who they are and enjoy getting to ... continue reading...
Making Read Alouds Come to Life: Creepy Carrots
Teacher read alouds are just as important as giving students time to read independently. Read alouds take the student's focus away from having to decode the words and gives students a chance to really hone in and focus on the meaning of the story. I love it when I read a story to children, and they love it so much that they beg me to READ IT AGAIN! It's so important to reread books to children and give them time to: Hear you thinking ... continue reading...
Centers for Kindergarten | Math and Literacy Activities
These centers for kindergarten are perfect for Spring! Printable and easy to prep centers for students to practice math and literacy skills. Centers for Kindergarten Center time in kindergarten is a time for students to develop and practice various math and ELA skills. We want center activities to be engaging and serve as an independent activity for students. During literacy and math centers, teachers are typically working in small groups. This should be a time, teachers can focus on their ... continue reading...
Opinion Writing for kindergarten and first grade
Opinion writing in kindergarten is one of those things, in my opinion (see what I did there) is best done spirally. We certainly introduce writing for a reason as a unit of study. However, we want the students' understanding of opinion writing to grow as their transcription skills grow. Recently Deedee worked in a kindergarten class and tested our new Opinion writing unit! She started by asking the question... Students wrote their opinion on a slip of paper and placed it on the ... continue reading...
The First Week of School! Pirate sheet added per request!
Shoo-Wee! I always forget how exhausting (but fun) the first week of Kindergarten is! Here are some of the things we did the first week. Mercy! Please excuse the spelling error above (listening)... Hello?! There's a big red line to call my attention to the error but I didn't see it until I had already saved the slide. So my error will just have to live on forever! :) Free Downloads To School Emergent Reader Handprint Puzzle Poem The Rainbow Names and ... continue reading...
Guiding Readers Questions and Answers
Last November Deedee and I had a conversation about her desire to do more with the books she was using for Read Alouds. Her kids loved many of the books she was reading to them, and they wanted to hear them again and again. She felt that she had a great foundation with writer's workshop (more on that later) but she wanted deeper connections and interactions with the texts that she was reading to her class. So we created Guiding Readers. What are Guiding Readers? Guiding Readers started ... continue reading...
How to Catch a Turkey! Procedural Writing
I love doing procedural writing with Kinders. They always have the cutest ideas for How to do things. We made a turkey and wrote about how to catch him. The example above says, First, you get a net. Next, hide in the bushes. Then, you catch him. To make the turkeys use Crayola Markers to color a coffee filter. Then use an eyedropper to drop a few drops of water on it to make the colors run together. Glue the turkey body on top of the coffee filter and then use scrap ... continue reading...