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 ;-))!