Let’s Play Some Basketball!

admin March 21, 2013 No Comments

The Final Four March Madness Basketball Tournament started today.  I really love college basketball!  With my son attending Michigan State University, we’ve been lucky enough to travel to East Lansing to see a few games.   On top of that, we are traveling again to MSU this weekend to watch our high school basketball team compete in the class B semi-finals.  How exciting!!  This is the first time in 40 years that our high school team has made it this far in the play-offs.  Wishing them all the luck in the world.  Well, in honor of the Final 4, I whipped up a few activities for our little basketball fans. Click HERE to download Swoosh! Basketball Sight Word Game from my TpT

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Response to Intervention- Short Vowels/CVC Activity Pack and Intervention Kit

admin March 14, 2013 No Comments

Thanks for stopping by and checking out the Response to Intervention- Short Vowels/CVC Activity Pack and Intervention Kit.  This activity pack is the third in a series of activity packs designed specifically for targeted small group instruction.  The activities align with the DIBELS Next assessment as well as assessments commonly administered in schools.  Most activities can be easily differentiated to meet the needs of all learners.  The Short Vowels/CVC Activity Pack contains 16 activities- 5 activities for teaching those tricky vowel sounds and 11 activities for CVC words.  We know that children learn best using a hands-on approach to teaching so you’ll have to gather some materials to assemble the activities if you purchase the printable activity pack.   The following

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Fun Springtime Activity for Beginning Sounds and Word Families

admin March 5, 2013 No Comments

I know spring is a little ways away and we haven’t yet even celebrated St. Patrick’s Day, but Kyle (fabulous artist) just finished these adorable caterpillars and I couldn’t help but post these a little early.   They are so, so cute and would be a perfect activity to go along with Very Hungry Caterpillar book (just love that book).   When you download the word families activity, you’ll receive 15 colorful word family caterpillars.  You can use these caterpillar when working on rhyme too. The Build a Caterpillar for Word Families activity is available in my TpT store. Of couse, we had to create an activity for working on the alphabetic principle. The Caterpillar activity for Beginning Sounds activity is also available in my TpT store. You’ll want

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More St. Patrick’s Day Activities!

admin March 3, 2013 No Comments

I was in my teacher friend, Deb’s, classroom this week and her students were working with common vowel teams.  We checked her inventory of activities and decided we needed to make some fun activities for use in her literacy centers to work on this phonics skill.  For a quick and easy activity, I whipped up this St. Patrick’s Day 4-In-A-Row game. Click the following link to download this freebie St. Patrick’s Day Vowel Teams 4-In-A-Row Activity To play this game, you’ll need a board for every two players.  Each player will need about 10 colored chips of the same color (each partner must have a different colored chip).   So, if we were playing, I may have 10 red chips and

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St. Patrick’s Day Digraph Activities

admin February 23, 2013 No Comments

St. Patrick’s Day is soon approaching!  My goodness, this school year is flying by.  It’s kind of fun how we measure our school year by the coming and goings of the holidays.  So far this year we’ve had 10 snow days!  Can you believe it?  10!  When you live in the great white north you never know what can happen.  We have 6 snow days built into the calendar (yes, that’s true) and anything over that we have to make up at the end of the year.  With winter not even over, we may have to go well into summer.   Anyway, here’s a little digraph activity I whipped up on one snow day morning. What you’ll need to do is

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The Need for Explicit Vocabulary Instruction

admin February 11, 2013 No Comments

This year we are working on expanding our RtI efforts to upper elementary.  Reading First so nicely laid out the expectations for quality core instruction for K-3, but we are finding that we are having to dig a little deeper into the research to find what effective literacy instruction looks like at the upper elementary level.  Explict vocabulary instruction and reading comprehension strategies are recurring themes in our reading.  Although very important in K-3 instruction, vocabulary and reading comprehension take center stage in upper elementary.  So with this in mind, I pulled out my favorite vocabulary resource book, Bringing Words to Life, along with other resources on vocabulary, to help guide us. What is vocabulary? The following is the National Reading Panel’s

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Short Vowels Cue Cards

admin February 5, 2013 No Comments

Some of our little readers are still having trouble confusing those short vowel sounds.  We certainly see this in their written work.  I’m hoping these cue cards can help.  Simply print the cards, cut them out and place them on the desk or table.  They serve as a visual cue to help with correct use of the vowel when writing.    Of course, not every student will need the cue card;  just those students who are still substituting one vowel for another. Click the following link to download FREE short vowel cue strips Vowel Prompt Cards If you are working with short vowel sounds in your small group intervention, the Vowels Sticks and Vowel Snatch are two great activities for teaching these

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Teaching Sight Words

admin January 28, 2013 No Comments

A few months back I posted the 10 Activities for Learning Letters and Sounds activity kit that I developed for a few first graders who hadn’t yet mastered letters and sounds.  The idea behind the kit was to provide fun, hands-on activities for either classroom voluteers or parents to work with their child at home.  Well, since that time, those little first graders have learned their letters and sounds and are now ready to focus on sight words.  So here’s the activity kit for learning the Dolch sight words.  Of course we’ll begin with list 1 (first 25), but I’ve made the activities through list 3. To assemble your very own kit, first print this 4-page pdf.  This file contains

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Teaching Blends and Digraphs

admin January 23, 2013 No Comments

Seems like this week there’s been quite a few questions about blends and digraphs.  Teachers have been asking and wanting to know what the difference is between a blend and a digraph, which to teach first and the best way to teach these skills.  Well, with all these questions, that was motivation enough for me to finish this post that I started literally a year ago.  I’m hoping this post can answer some of these burning questions about teaching blends and digraphs. Question 1: What’s the difference between a blend and a digraph? Consonant Blends A consonant blend is when two or more consonants are blended together, but each sound may be heard in the blend.  The most common beginning

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I (Heart) Vowels

admin January 19, 2013 No Comments

I know it’s a little crazy, but I really do love vowels.  It’s so important that our young readers learn those vowel sounds correctly so that they can decode words and use them correctly in their writing.  Activities which involve discriminating the vowels sounds are so helpful, especially for those students who are having difficulty hearing the difference between the similar sounding vowels.  I created the vowel sticks activity with a little Valentine twist for use during your small group instruction.  For children just learning the vowel sounds, you may opt to begin with only two vowels (begin with dissimlar sounding vowels such as the /o/ and /i/) and then gradually work up to using all five.  You simply say the vowel sound and have the students hold

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