Teaching CVC Words with Games in the Classroom

One of my favorite things about teaching in the primary grades is how much they grow as readers throughout the year! When I taught kindergarten, most kids came in not knowing all of their letters and sounds, much less how to blend them to read a word. But by the end of the year, they were independently reading decodable CVC word readers with ease! It absolutely amazes me every year! As a teacher, it is such a thrilling moment to see how far they've come.

Now that I'm teaching first grade, the beginning of the year is SO different - now I'm starting out the year working on CVC words and word families! The majority of my kiddos this year are at or above grade level, so I've been able to dive right in with some short vowel review activities and literacy centers. I'm going to share some of my favorite strategies and resources for teaching CVC words and provide some simple, low-prep activities that you can implement right away!

One of the best ways to increase student engagement and learning is to have them play games! Kids love to play them and half the time they don't even realize they are working on skills and supplementing their learning. I also love getting kids involved with creating their own activities to help them learn, so here I had my students make their own game to practice one of their Short A Word Families: -ag. At this center, they created the "Bag of -ag Words". Students wrote -ag family words from a list on different paper bag printable pieces.

Then, they cut them out and put them inside an actual paper lunch bag.

Now, they are ready to play the game! Students pull one -ag bag word out at a time and write the word they read on the recording sheet.

To keep with the theme, I implemented other activities that had a play on words to go with the word family we were learning that day. The next game students can create is the "Can of -an Words" game. Students cut on printable lines to create a can that they glue to a piece of paper, cut out words in the -an family, put them inside the can, then pull, read, and color the word they chose. It's a fun way to work on word recognition and fluency!

For the next Short A Word Family, the -at Family, students can create a "Mat of -at Words". Using multicolored squares (love Astrobrights paper for this!) students will write all the -at family words they can think of and glue them in different places to create a colorful mat.

The last activity for Short A Word Families isn't a game, but just a fun little activity that is SO easy to prep. The last word family we learned was the -ap family, so students practiced reading and writing the words by creating an "-ap Family Cap". I just printed the template out on colored construction paper, the students wrote the words out and cut the cap template out, and then I stapled it together around their heads using a sentence strip!

Hands-on activities always make learning so much more fun! I love using these activities during our literacy center time. To add these fun activities to your short vowel resources, click on the picture below to find out more!

Christmas Rewind and New Year's SALE!

I have been MIA for awhile! The last two weeks of school were crazy between having benchmark testing, our cute little holiday show, and gingerbread house building party. The minute school got out, I dove right into all the Christmas festivities, so I haven't had much of a chance to sit and update my little blog until now! I've got pictures of activities to share, so hopefully they will be useful for you to log away some ideas for next year! We did the Elf on the Shelf again this year, and the kids absolutely loved it, but this year I had some skeptical friends that took some convincing on my part to believe in the "magic"! To introduce the fabulous candy cane graph activity from Deanna Jump's Christmas Math and Literacy Fun unit, I had our elf deliver candy canes to the students one morning:

Then we used our 5 senses to brainstorm as many words as we could to describe candy canes; then completed the cute Christmas tree graph to see how many of us liked candy canes or not. As you can see, "yes" won in a landslide!

                  
We participated in a ton of fun holiday themed centers during the month of December.

1. This one is called "String the Lights" and the kids LOVED it! I strung two huge pieces of yarn across our big carpet - one line was to build -at family words, and the other line was to build -an family words. Then they wrote their words on the recording sheet and drew the picture to match!

 

2. "Bakin' Up Sight Words" - the students chose a Christmas cookie card, read the sight word, and recorded it in the matching space on the response sheet.

 

 

3. "Elf Number Order" - I gave each student a number card out of order and they had to work together to put the cards in order from 1-20. Once they completed that part of the activity, they ordered the numbers themselves for independent practice.

 





All of these centers and much, much more can be found in my Deck the Halls {Christmas Math & Literacy Centers} unit on TPT! There are sight word games, labeling activities, counting on, more/less, and ordering numbers math activities, sentence building games, and MORE! And it's on sale for today only! So even though Christmas is over, you can get it now and be really prepared for next year. ;)

 There are so many great holiday books to read at this time of year, and one of our favorites is, of course, How the Grinch Stole Christmas. We used Deanna Jump's fantastic Grinch unit activity to brainstorm all the ways we would make the Grinch grin.. and let me tell you, my little kinder babies melted my heart with some of their responses. My favorite? "Give him a mom." Love. Here is a web we made of some of our ideas (and can I just say how proud I was of my Grinch drawing? Yeah, it turned out kinda awesome).

 



 

We also made a list of adjectives to describe what the Grinch was like before his heart grew 3 sizes.

 

Here were a few of my favorite craftivities my kiddos came up with. And let me tell you, even though they are young, after reading the 1st ("give him a family") and 4th ("give him a mom") ways they would make him grin, it makes you realize that sometimes kids are pretty astute.

Another favorite story, among many, is Gingerbread Baby by Jan Brett. After reading the story, I told the students I had made them gingerbread cookies, but when I got the container out to show them, they were GONE! Of course, they had run away just like the cookie had in the story. ;) To make the gingerbread baby come back, the boy built him a gingerbread house, so we did the same in hopes that our cookies would return to us! We made little houses like this, left them on our desks, and thankfully it made the cookies come running back while my littles were at P.E.! What impeccable timing!

 



There you have a little snapshot and rewind of some of the activities we participated in this holiday season! Now that the New Year is upon us, I have a gift for you! For today only I am throwing a sale in my TPT store - 20% everything until midnight tonight!

Whether the Weather...

I've been wanting to post this stuff for awhile, but I always seem to get sidetracked with... teaching! As we all know, it feels like the work never ends. Oh well, better late than never! Our reading unit just recently ended with a weather theme that I am going to pick back up when Spring rolls around... though it already feels like it is here in Arizona, we don't really have a winter... ha! I wanted my kids to keep a daily weather observation journal, so prior to starting that we began to brainstorm a weather word wall. I was so impressed with the vocabulary they came up with! We brainstormed 3-4 words a day, added them to a sentence stem, and the kids read and wrote the words.

When we began to do our weather observations, my kids used the word wall WONDERFULLY and their writing came out so good. We went outside everyday and I videotaped the kids with a microphone (a pencil topped with a styrofoam ball!) as they pretended to be "meteorologists". I created this journal for the kids to use - they had to choose one weather "word of the day" to write in the box at the top of the daily journal entry. They then have to use that word at least one time in their actual writing entry. Feel free to download by clicking the link above the pictures:

Google Docs: Weather Journal (Clipart courtesy of Scrappin Doodles/Fonts from Kevin & Amanda)

In an attempt to get my kinders to start doing more independent work, we read the story "What Will the Weather Be Like Today?" by Paul Rogers. After we read it whole group, I split the kids up into 5 separate groups, gave them their own copy of the book, and gave them one certain page to study and describe to me all the different picture clues they saw to let them know what kind of weather day it was. After they found all of their clues, each group created their own poster to describe what they would do on their certain weather day. I wasn't sure how the whole small group work would fly, considering they hadn't produced many projects on their own, but they did a great job! They all created their respective posters together and then presented it to the class. I was very happy with how they worked together. Here is one of the posters my Sunny Day group created: 

Most kids just drew detailed pictures, but a lot of them wrote sentences describing what they did. Love it!

I began creating my own weather unit with some math and literacy games that I hope to get out on TPT come Springtime. In the meantime, I used a couple of games I created. One of them was the "Striking Short -I" word sort. They loved this game! After they sorted all of the lightning bolts, they used the recording sheet to write the words in the right word family section. Here's a glimpse of what it looks like:

You can download the game for free here on Google Docs! (Clipart courtesy of Scrappin Doodles/Fonts from Kevin & Amanda): Striking Short I! Word Family Sort

Before I end this I just wanted to send a huge thank you to Deedee Wills at Mrs. Wills' Kindergarten and a host of others for having a February contest -- I was one of the lucky winners and I got 7 FABULOUS February units to use in my classroom. I was able to use a few of the literacy activities from some of the ladies' units and my kids about died over them. Thank you Deedee and your fellow bloggers for having such a generous contest!!