Schoolroom Swag

Elementary Teacher

Having fun in the classroom and "balancing" life!

Tuesday, September 9, 2014

fun phonics


I am all about fun phonics lately. And my math stations. Which are not going well at this point. But that's a topic for a different day. Phonics is going great, so let's just focus on that. Baby steps.

This week we have the short o sound. Here we are making "popcorn" words. A little crepe paper and a plastic popcorn tub and you're good to go! We wrote short o words onto pieces of yellow crepe paper "popcorn", wadded them up, and tossed them into the popcorn box!

Then we glued our short o "popcorn" onto a paper popcorn tub. Even my Crabby McCrabbensteins got into it and had fun.

Last week we concentrated on the short a sound, so we built a track. With every short a word they wrote on a white board, they got to choose a piece of railroad track. Wow. Talk about engaged. I have never seen a group of 6 year olds so excited about the short a. Just hand over that "Teacher of the Year" award, please. I have my place on the shelf  all ready.


 
These pictures are actually from when we used the trains to compose and decompose numbers. Cross-curriculur! Yay! That was pretty cool. We really had fun with that. We put trains together (Good ol' Thomas to the rescue!), wrote addition sentences, and then pulled them apart for related subtraction.
If you need some easy-to-implement phonics activities for those days when you're just too tired and busy to recreate the wheel, here they are. Each of my hands on phonics units are $1.50. They come with at least 4 activities (or more) and have corresponding worksheets if you choose to use them.
Thanks for reading!

Glitter Words
[Glitterfy.com - *Glitter Words*]

Sunday, September 7, 2014

Hands On Phonics planning freebie

I'm always looking for new ways to practice phonics.  We use  white boards a lot. And I try to find fun activities to do that are hands on, memorable and cater to my movers and shakers. Here's one thing I've done.

I was given a MULTITUDE of connecting cubes.  So I put alphabet stickers on them and we build words.

 
 
 I sometimes use printables that go along with them where the kids write words they make with the sound of the week. You can find them here.
I also made a planning sheet that I thought would be easy to quickly look at and remember at a glance what I have planned.

I left plenty of room at the bottom for pictures of any units I am using. It's worked out pretty slick so far. You can find it free here.


Glitter Words
[Glitterfy.com - *Glitter Words*]