This week we practiced our sight words with a beach ball and a connect four game. I taped our sight words onto a beach ball and we passed it around until the music stopped. When it stopped, whatever words the student's hands were on, they had to read the words. We also played our sight word connect four game. I'm excited to report that all the students could read their sight words by the end of the week! YAY!
To practice our phonics skill, we used one of our connect four games from TPT. The kids always get excited when we play one of these games. I love that they have fun with it, it is easy to get ready and they are learning all at the same time!
We have been working a lot on our sight words and have been doing a few fun activities to practice them daily. One day we played musical chairs. I played the kids Christmas Program music and they sang along to it as they walked around the chairs. When the music stopped, they sat down in a chair with a word on it. If they didn't get a chair they were out...........but they had a chance to get back in. I then went around and each student had 3 seconds to tell me what his/her word was and if they missed it then they sat out and someone else came back in the game. They had a blast with it.
The second game was having a snowball fight. The kids wrote down a sight word on a piece of scrap paper and crumbled it up. They threw it in the room and then had to go find one. They picked one up, opened it and had to read the word to me. We also played this one in math using addition facts.
What are some of the ways that you practice sight words/vocabulary words? I am on a hunt for some more ideas of ways to practice and would love to hear from you!
On another note, check out the cool gingerbread train that one of our student's grandparents made for us. (Do you know how hard it was to have to cut it up for the kids to eat it? I didn't want to do it because it looked so neat and I didn't want to mess it up.)
I always get very excited when I teach the kids to tell time because we start with the hour and they get it with no problem. Later on in the year, we introduce time to the half hour and there is just something about that half hour that throws the kiddos for a loop. For some reason after teaching the half hour, they seem to forget how to tell time to the hour. I think it has something to do with now the hour hand moves to the middle of the numbers and now we have to count by 5's with the minute hand.
Well, this year it happened again and I found some things that I tried this year that seemed to really help the kids with it. By the end of the week, I can say that the majority of the kids had telling time to the hour and half hour down and were excited because they could do it without any problems.
Here are some of the things that I used to help them with the telling time this year:
1. This was a really cool idea to help the kids remember the difference between the short hand and long hand. I found it on teachertipster.com:
I then added to this and told the kids that the ladies liked to count by 1's and would stop at 12 because they counted a shorter amount of time then the men. We then talked about how the men would count for a longer amount of time and they loved to count by 5's only.
2. I found this cool game board over at First Grade Fanatic. I just changed it a little bit so on the game board it had time to the hour and half hour. When the kids finished his/her page, then they went and got the game board and the data sheet that went along with it. They loved this game and it was great practice for them.
3. Finally, we played our TPT I have, Who has Telling Time to the hour and 1/2 hour to practice some more.
Using all of these resources really seemed to help the kids more this year with telling time to the hour and half hour. YAY!
