Rainbow Word Practice

To help students practice their sight words our team took the Dolch primer and preprimer list and grouped them in sets of 8. We then assigned each group a different color. In October students take home their first set of words. They practice them all week and we test them on an assigned day. If they know all of the words we give them the next set of words. Once they have mastered all of the words we move on to writing the words. It is amazing how motivated students are to learn their sight words. They can't wait to get the next color!

To practice the words in school students take a plastic school box and build the words using lacing letters. They build each word and string it in a pipe cleaner. Every so often I have to re do the boxes because the letters get mixed up. My kiddos had so much fun mixing all the letters up today and sorting them back out into the correct boxes. 

I store all of the pencil boxes in a plastic container.

These would also be great to use during your guided reading groups. 

St. Patrick's Day fun!!!

Any one else gearing up for St. Patrick's Day? Here are a couple thing I am planning for next week.

My kiddos love read the room activities. So I whipped up this St. Patrick's Day themed read the room.  Students will be searching for gold and then determining if the word on the gold is a real word or a nonsense word. You can check out the game on my TpT store.

Searching for Gold. Students draw cards from the deck. Each card has an addition sentence written on it. If the student can answer the addition sentence they can keep the card if not they put it back, but beware of the leprechaun he is out to streak your gold. Hopefully you will get the pot of gold before he steals all yours. Click on the picture to check out the game on my Teachers Pay Teachers store.

A great silent e game. Where students are looking for the Leprechaun under rainbows.  In order to turn the rainbow card over they must read the silent e word on the card.  Click on the picture to check out the game on my Teachers Pay Teachers store.

I also have a STEM project in mind but I will share more about that later. Stay tuned!

Grace for President

Last year in preparation for Common Core my reading teacher did a PD on close reading. At the time I was super excited and used it at least once a week if not more. With everything that we have been doing this year I kinda forgot about Close Reading until the other day when I was searching through my guided reading binder and found my notes from the PD. I love it when I find things that I had forgotten. I added Close Reading to my To Do List... with the intention of doing a couple of close reading in the up coming weeks.

Now I don't have a mounted SMART Board but I love using SMART Notebook to organize and teach my lessons. So with that and knowing that I wanted to plan a couple of Close Reading lessons I sat down to create a template of what I wanted the lesson and SMART Board to look like. Here are a couple of snap shoots of what my SMART Board for close reading looks like.

I am not sure how it works but I am going to try and see what happens. If you want to see the rest of my slides in this lesson head over to my teacher pay teachers store and download the SMART Notebook file. 

Gearing Up for Addition

Monday was supposed to be the first day of our addition unit in math but it looks like MOTHER NATURE is not done with us yet. So we are going to have to put off our addition unit until Wednesday. Here is what I have in mind...

Technology Connection (click on the image)

***Harry Kindergarten also had a great video explaining addition but he recently took it down. He promises he is going to be up loading new videos here soon.

Images from my SMART Notebook

You can get a free copy of my independent practice here.