Small Group Warm-Up Activities!

Hey there! 

What are you up to on a Friday night? Here I am blogging...but hey, the house is quiet and I've had something that I've been wanting to share for awhile. 

My daughter is actually home from college, but she wanted to go to the football game. My husband is at a men's recharge (preaching services). I cannot wait to spend some time with Harley tomorrow so I figured now was a good time to hop on and show you what has me so excited.

Ever since learning more about the process of learning to read, I've been trying to find quick and easy ways to get a lot of practice into my intervention time with students. I'm pretty excited about two new things I'm using this year and want to share them with you.

First, SuperSpeed 100 for sight words. This is a FREE activity from Whole Brain Teaching. They also have SuperSpeed 1000. I am using this (along with their FREE Biffytoons for my youngest readers) to practice sight words and it literally takes only about 3 minutes of my intervention time and the kids are loving it. The best part is that I've already seen my 1st graders improving on their AimsWeb Plus Word Reading Progress Monitoring. Whoop! Whoop!

Second, is what I'm calling Phonics Warm-Up Activities. I created these to use with my students as they progress through our explicit phonics and phonemic awareness lessons. My initial thought was to have students warm-up using the boards by reading the line of words with our targeted sound, but now I see that the possibilities are endless! Here's a peek at some of my students using the boards:

The boards can be used in small groups, as a center activity, or when students have extra time in the classroom. They can be used as a warm-up activity, roll-and-read, decoding practice, fluency practice, or as an orthographic mapping activity. My latest idea is to play "Bingo" by giving students sound hints to find specific words. I'm going to try this out next week. 

Like the SuperSpeed games, these activities are simple to prep (print and go) and don't take a lot of my intervention time to get lots of practice in. The boards start with short vowels and progress through more difficult skills. You can check them out in our TPT store for a full list of skills covered if you're interested. 

Enjoy your weekend! I know I'm going to enjoy seeing Harley...miss my kiddos so much (thankfully they still text and/or call quite a bit ;-))!

Schedule Spotlight Series - #4 PHONICS

Hello! We have linked up again with Kelli for her Schedule Spotlight Series. This linky is so great because it is helping me get new ideas on how to arrange my day better.  This week's topic is Phonics.

 

For the past years, I have always taught phonics sometime in the morning with the reading.  We have the Treasures Reading Program and I have adapted it a little to try and keep those little ones attention.  It takes me about 10-15 minutes to complete the phonics lesson. 

 

I have made up little characters (they are just printed off on paper).  For example, for the short o I use Mr. Olive the Ostrich.  This is just a picture of a Ostrich on it.  Before I introduce our visitor, I will give the students clues of what they like and what their favorite things are.  For example, I would tell them that this visitor likes to swim in a pond.  His favorite animal is a dog.  He sleeps on a cot.  He loves odd numbers.

 

After giving them several clues, the students try to guess the sound that our visitor makes.  After they guess, I introduce the visitor to them (even though it is just a piece a paper, they always seem to get so excited-like it is a real visitor LOL!).  We then discuss the different ways to spell the sound and I write it on the board. 

 

Once the visitor has been introduced and we have discussed all the ways to spell this sound.  I tell them that the visitor has brought his/her favorite song with them.  This song comes from the CD's Funky Phonics.  I tell them that they will hear a lot of our visitors favorite sound in the song.  We then listen one time to the song and then on the second time they can sing the song. 

 

 

During our transition times, I will often play the song again for them and by the end they are supposed to have followed all my directions.  This just helps them to learn the song better and practice the sound that we are working on for the week.

 

Later on in the mornings, we break up into reading pathways groups.  We are lucky because we have Title teachers that come and help us during this time.  It is a 30 minute period where we have groups of about 5-6 students and we do our pathways reading program.  Each title teacher takes a group as well as myself. 

 

The pathways program is a phonics program that uses more hands on materials and visuals to help the kids learn various phonics sounds.  It helps them to learn the rules for the sounds and also provides them with practice of sounding out and spelling words. 

 

Last year, we started doing Daily 5 and being the first year, I felt like I didn't spend as much time on our visitors as I have in the past.  The kids really like it and I plan to try and take the time to do more of it again this coming year. 

 

Make sure you head over to Castles and Crayons and link up so I can see what you are doing for phonics.  

 

 

http://castlesandcrayons.blogspot.com/2013/07/schedule-spotlight-series-4-phonics.html