Rainbow Words

Over the years I have found that next to reading everyday, students being able to identify sight words is a key component in students ability to read. At my school we do a program called Rainbow Words to help kids learn their sight words.

Rainbow words are the Dolch pre-primer and primer words divided into groups of 8 words. Each group is then given a color. Students are given the red words to start and practice those words for a week. On Friday a parent volunteer comes in and quizzes students on those words if they know them all they are given the orange words. The next week if they know all of the red and all of the orange words they are given yellow words. This continues until students have mastered all of the words. Once they are able to identify all of the words we go back through the list to see who can write them. 

When we introduce Rainbow Words we sent a letter home to parents explaining the program and why we do it. You can view that letter here.

My wonderful teaching assistant has come up with this great way of making all the sets of Rainbow words. Each sheet contains 1 word 8 times. You copy the sheet on the correct construction paper stack all the sheets for that color on top of each other and use a paper cutter to cut them apart. When done this way you make 8 sets of Rainbow words at a time then all you have to do is hole punch them.  Want to use Rainbow Words in your class? Click HERE!

Last Minute Halloween Word Work

On Friday I decided that my kiddos need some new word work activities so I packed up all the fall and farm games and went searching for some Halloween games.  But when I opened the bin I wasn't impressed with anything that I found.  So with 4 empty game buckets on my desk I went home.

Soo after our amazing camping trip (check out the sunrise on the beach) I sat down to make some new games.

This week my kiddos will spin the spinner and stamp the sight word. Get a free copy here!!

Match the Trick or Treater to their corresponding bucket. (Trick or Treat CVC picture word match)

Sort some monster candy by it's ending sound. (Monster Ending Sound Sort)

Transitions and not the Movement Kind

This week we have been working on adding transitions to our narrative writing. For this we looked at a couple different stories to see how they began. What we found was that many stories started with one day..., last week, So we write these down on the first car of our transition train.

Then we looked at the middle of stories and noted that they had words like then, next, So we added those words to our train.

On Friday we looked at the end of stories and saw that they ended with words like suddenly, last, finally. We added these words to the end of our train.

Here is what our train looked like when we put it all together.

Grab your FREE copy of the transition train here.

Down on the Farm-Pigs

To get ready for our Field Trip to the farm we have been spending some time learning about farm animals. We started off by learning about pigs. Here is what our concept board looked like at the end of the week.

Here are some of the books that we read.

We also visited Pebble Go and learned all we could about pigs.

And just for fun we did a cute piggy craft. Get your FREE copy here.

Next up cows!!!!