Explicit Phonics (with FREEBIE)

Planning....Does it take anyone else forever?
My guided reading plans take me quite a while to plan because I want to make sure I choose the right text and skills for the individual students I am teaching.

One part of my group time that was taking me a lot of preparation was the phonics portion.  I like to have the students highlight the sounds throughout the week, sort the words by sounds, and read words with the phonics skill in context.

But what I found was that I was creating new phonics sheets each week or searching through my file folders to find what I needed.  It...was...not...working for me anymore.

So after 6 months of slowly working on it, I finally have a completed set of sheets that I use in guided reading groups now.  YES!

Here is what I do:

Monday: I introduce the new skill by decoding the words together with these "flashcards."  I could cut them apart but I actually just keep the whole sheet together.

Tuesday: We practice this skill together by highlighting the pattern.  My time in group is short; therefore, we only highlight the first two rows.

Wednesday: We move on to the last two rows and complete our highlighting and decoding together.

Thursday: I want my students to use the phonics skill in context.   First, they read the sentences independently or chorally.  Then I ask them to look for the pattern within the sentences.  They get to circle the words with the focus skill.

 I have been using these sheets all year (as I slowly made them) and have found that the kids really enjoy them.  They love using highlighters, markers, and searching for the patterns hidden within the sentences.  Here is a list of all the skills that I hit:

I hope they can help your kids too!

If you would like to try it out first, please grab this FREEBIE below!  You can also find it on the "Teaching Blog Addict."

Favorite Pins Friday

 I'm linking up with Cara over at First Grade Parade today. 

I have been all about these digital papers this week!

They come from Write in the Middle and I love them!  I was able to use them to make these flashcards! (You can click on them if you want them).

Next up is a book...has anyone read this one?

The pin came from "The Best Children's Books." I have been looking for some inspirational punctuation books.

Another great school pin:

This came from Joyful Learning in KC.  I am reading Smarter Charts right now and I am wondering how I can incorporate this Word Box!

Okay--I saw this picture and fell in love with these trees.

The idea is from Dishfunctional Designs.  I have not formulated my idea on how to use this yet.  But I know something will come to me.

And finally...a healthy dessert.

This pin comes from Detoxinista.  This is a pineapple whip.  It only calls for pineapple, almond milk, and honey.  I made it for the 4th yesterday and it was a hit!

Hope everyone had a good 4th!

Listening and Some Tippy Toeing

Anyone read Tippy Toe Chick Go?

It is such a cute story!  My husband drew a really spectacular (one of our Fancy Nancy words this week) diagram of Tippy Toe's solution but I just can't find the image on my computer.  I will have to search some more and then share it.

I was inspired this week by Katherine Marie's photography.

I am in love with her cute little chicks!  I had to do something with them.  Hmmm...
We decided that we needed to work on the listening standards with our Green Chimps.  Listening has been a challenge all year (next year...we will jump on that right away.  Our brains are already formulating a plan).
I turned these cute little chicks into a listening activity.  Here is what I came up with:

If you would like it, just click on the image! To do this activity, you need:
one large circle for the body
one triangle for the beack
two little circles for the eyes
one sheet of paper to glue and draw on
Here are some images on how the chick turned out.

Aren't they adorable!?!!

My amazing teammate, Karen, also completed a chart to describe Tippy Toe's character in the story.  These were the answers from our Green Chimps!!! It was exciting to see how well they did.

This was a fun "take and make" activity.  So I am linking up with 2nd Grade Pad to share this.

Have a good Friday!
Em

Busy Bees and FREEBIE

Oh my!  I have not posted in what feels like a very long time.  What a busy time of year!  Shopping, planning, shopping, crafting...it is hard to keep up!

Here's what we did last week!

We follow the Reading Street stories and last week was Honey Bees.

With the help of some google searching, pinterest looking, and blog postings, we came up with some great activities to really hit home how important bees are to our environment.

I found a great book called Bee and Me.  I had never read it before but...oh...my...it fit what we were trying to teach the firsties perfectly!  And they loved it because it had the moving pictures in it.

Then we showed about 2-3 minutes of clips from The Bee Movie.  There is one scene that illustrates pollination and the bees explain why it is so important.  THEN it shows what the world would look like without pollination.  It was perfect!

I saw on a few different blogs that using Cheetos could really illustrate how pollination occurs.  So we gave it a try.  And of course it was a hit!

Here are my cute little flowers and with their pollen.

They had to touch each new flower they visited.

Some of them started to really rub the pollen on!

To assess the students, we created the following form below.  We used the common core and our science standards to help us.  Pictured below is just the first page of the assessment.  The second and third page are a picture sort of things that bees do and do not impact.  If you click on the caption, you can download it!

Click HERE to download this assessment

 Our lucky green chimps also used a bee to help them practice their spelling words (along with the powerpoint).  They were super excited to write their words on the bee and they look super cute hanging in the hall (inside their hive).

And of course my good friend Natalie supported all of this great bee learning in math.  Thanks!

We really enjoyed our bee week!  But next up...Pete the Cat Saves Christmas!  Our entire building is going to go Pete crazy the week before winter break.  We could not be more excited.  Can't wait to show you all that we do!

On a final note...
Hope everyone is enjoying this great season.  We are having extremely warm weather for December and it is really throwing me off this year.  But I am trying to take advantage of it.  We went to the zoo last week (when it was 70 degree out) to soak up all their Christmas lights.  It was great, as always!

Next up on the holiday to-do list...buckeyes!  YUM!

Em

A Success Much, Much Needed

It has been quite a challenge to determine exactly what we need and want to do with our little green chimps.  There is a lot of diverse need in this group, which has caused us to use A LOT of brain power (along with some headaches) trying to figure out what to do.  So last week I posted some Powerpoints that I made to help with the grade level phonics skill of short vowel o.  We used a mixture of these Powerpoints, whole group, small group, and some independent work.  All of this hard work amounted to 9 students earning a 90-100%, 3 earning a 80-90%, and only 3 students did not pass their phonics assessment and spelling test!  That is a huge success for us compared to previous weeks (which led to some watery eyes by the teachers).

We are going to continue on this wonderful path with some more Powerpoints.