A Doggone Fun Phonological Awareness Activity

admin July 19, 2015 No Comments

The research is very clear regarding the relationship between phonological/ phonemic awareness skills and later reading achievement. Children need to have an appreciation of how sounds can be put together to create words. Incorporating phonemic awareness activities into our lessons is critically important and they really don’t need to take up a significant amount of time. Quick and easy activities such as the Doggie, Where’s My Bone? activity are perfect for use during your small group instruction. This particular activity teaches students to recognize the position of sounds within words. You simply say a word containing 3 sounds– such as “cat”– and then a sound within the word– such as /a/. The student places a bone on either the head, body or

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Teaching the Consonant+le Syllable Type

admin March 21, 2015 No Comments

It’s always so much fun listening and watching our young readers figure out those “longer” words. Many of our little ones are pretty solid decoding one-syllable words and are now ready to learn strategies for decoding multisyllabic words. So, really, what is a syllable? Simply put, a syllable is a unit of pronunciation containing a single vowel sound. “Syllabication” is the process of analyzing the pattern of vowels and consonants in a word to determine where a word is broken into its syllables. The ability to break a word into syllables helps students decode those longer words as well as helps the student remember spelling patterns. Understanding the 7 syllable types helps students to become better readers and writers. There

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St. Patrick’s Day FREEBIE!

admin March 4, 2015 No Comments

Be sure to jump on over to my TpT store to download this St. Patrick’s Day freebie for learning and practicing sight words.  When you download this file you’ll receive 6 game boards with words from the first 6 lists of the Dolch sight words.  The game boards are great for centers or even send them home for added practice.  The St. Patrick’s Day Sight Word Game Boards can be downloaded from my online Teachers Pay Teachers store. Enjoy!  

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Fun Little St. Patrick’s Day Activity for Practicing Digraphs

admin March 2, 2015 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 9 snow days!  Can you believe it?  9!  It seems like we’ve been hit with a deep freeze this year.  It’s not often that you read -29 degrees on your car thermometer.  That’s not even counting the wind chill.   When you live in the great white north you never know what can happen.  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

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A Strategy for Helping Students Learn to Blend

admin January 14, 2015 No Comments

If you’ve been reading my blog for awhile you may know that I’m just a little (okay, a lot) addicted to professional books.  I really love keeping up with the current research in reading and learning difficulties.  One of my favorite authors is Isabel Beck.  I love her book, Bringing Words to Life – it’s the go-to book on teaching vocabulary.  Her most recent book, Making Sense of Phonics: The Hows and Whys is an equally valuable resource for phonics instruction.  I was re-reading the book the other night and came across a strategy for blending that I thought would be helpful for many of my kindergarten and first grade teacher friends.  The strategy is called successive blending. After students

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Long Vowel Spelling Patterns

admin December 17, 2014 No Comments

Many of my first and second friends are now working with long vowel sounds.  Those vowels can be so tricky as sometimes the vowel says a short sound and sometimes a long sound, and then to top it off, there are several different spelling patterns for long vowels.  When our young readers are learning these patterns, reference posters often help.  I created this poster just for this purpose.  You can download this freebie by just clicking the link below.  To download this poster just click the following link: Long Vowel Sounds Poster I created the Long Vowel Sounds Spelling Patterns activity for my first and second grade friends to practice the long vowel sounds spelling patterns.  Each booklet contains 16 practice

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Free Phonics Cue Card

admin November 16, 2014 No Comments

I’m so lucky to be working with kind and dedicated educators!  When my two school friends, Kim and Robin, asked me to create a cue card for them to use with their students, well of course, I was happy to do it.  They had cue cards for the letters and sounds and just needed something a little more advanced that would address long vowel sounds, digraphs and diphthongs.  The cue card is intended to be placed on student’s desks for reference during reading and writing activities. Now when I showed another school friend the cue card she asked that I substitute the digraph pictures with the cues that we use when we are teaching digraphs.    If you’d like to

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Free Digraph Posters

admin November 6, 2014 No Comments

Have you ever had a project that you’ve been meaning to get to, but for some reason it just lingers on in your to-do list?  That’s kind of how it was with these consonant digraphs posters.  They’ve just been sitting on desktop for literally over a year.   Well, my friend was helping me with a computer project and he literally gasped when he saw the mess of files on my desktop.  That was motivation enough to get to work on a few of those projects. If you’d like to download these posters, just click HERE.  They are available for a free download in my Teachers Pay Teachers store.

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Teaching the Hard and Soft “C” and “G”

admin October 30, 2014 No Comments

Our little first graders will soon be introduced to the two sounds of  “c” and “g”.  Those two consonants are a bit tricky as they make different sounds depending upon the letter that follows in the word.  We typically teach students that the “hard” sounds of “c” and “g” occur most often, but they do need to know when these letters make the “soft” sound.  We tell the students that when the letter “c” is followed by the letters i, e or y, the “c” makes the /s/ sound just like in the words “city”, “cent” and “icy”. The letter “g” is similar.  When the “g” is followed by an i, e or y it makes the /j/ sound as

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Fun Fall Freebie

admin October 23, 2014 No Comments

My fabulous artist, Kyle, drew this tree one afternoon for her daughter when she asked her mom for a tree to color.  It must be so much fun to have an artist as your mother.  Kyle sent this coloring page along to post on the blog just in case others would like to download it for their students or even for their own children.  Eleanor used markers to color her tree, but your students may want to try watercolors or even bingo dabblers to make leaves. Just click the following link: Fall Coloring Page  Enjoy!

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