Preschool Phonics. Animal Talk: A way to learn letter sounds. The following activities are meant to be a fun way to learn letter sounds. From birth our children are subjected to the sounds that animals make. From their little stuffed animals to adults pointing at pictures or real -life animals and imitating the sounds they make. Animal sounds are among the first "words" that a baby speaks. Learning that letters make sounds is hard to grasp when you can't "hear" the letters speak.
That is why I created these cards and the following activities . Next you will want to get these adorable Animal Talk cards: If you don't have lower-case alphabet cards, or you are like me and like things to match, you will want to get these next: Lower-case alphabet cards Aren't you glad I learned how to share files? Happy Day! Homeschool Talk: Growth is a Guarantee. This blog is really about Simply Inspired Home Living, but my readers have had a lot of questions and in response I’ve dedicated this ONE week to homeschool talk! Here’s my lame effort to bridge the gap between the two: Paint Chip Phonics Cards!
Brilliant idea, right – the flash cards, not my attempt at uniting homeschooling with decor and design! Pink and Green Mama At the end of this week I’m going to share our journey, but in addition to my story, I’m so thankful to sweet friends being willing to share their wisdom! Yesterday, Krista shared a ton of resources for Homeschool Curriculum. Krista’s perspective is very inspiring…. I found an email I sent to Jeff last July when I was out of town planning for school. Reading the note I wrote to Jeff made me a little sad. So, how’s that for encouraging?? I read Oswald Chambers last week and I could relate to his words in a few situations in our lives right now. Right Brain Activities for Home Practice - Part 1 — Babylicious by Figur8. Having spoken to other mothers from around the world about early child development and right brain education, I realise that we are very fortunate to have not one but three right brain schools in our country.
In many countries there aren’t any right brain schools at all. So what’s a mother to do if she wants to help develop her child’s right brain on her own? Here’s a list of right brain activities that I have compiled based on what I have seen, heard, and read about: These are great activities to do for “home practice” even if your child attends a right brain class. Update: For more activities that I think are great for developing the brain, check out these articles: 1. There are two imaging activities that I know about: Activity 1: Ask your child to close his eyes. If you’ve seen the Wink program from Right Brain Kids, this is the magic carpet ride activity.
Activity 2: You need to make image cards for this activity. Here is an example of an image card from the Wink program: Marva Collins Multisensory Wall Cards « Candy 4WAY Phonics is Phonics 4 Ways! Right Brain: How We Organize & Play {At 3 Years Old} Just so you know, my paper trail is a mile long. There is my own work, hubby's work, loans, bills, cards.... the worse of the lot? Tiger's right brain thingamajigs See the fugly drawers? Got them at Tesco for RM 29 The top 2 drawers contain flashcards I have sorted into 10 topics (10 cards each) So that's 100 cards a day.
The third drawer is to chuck the used sets The fourth contain materials I intend to use daily for the week. Namely, the linking memory set, flashcards, crayons, eye exercise I pull out the entire drawer for convenience. Other materials that I use only once a week are kept in this hanging file box from POPULAR. I usually prepare 5 files in advance. If I take one file and open it, it will contain these: For the photographic memory, I have ditched the blue folder.
Too cumbersome. Currently, I am using two clear folders for the background. Like this: This current method is by far the best and fastest. He is really keen on playing "Ready? That's what we call our home practice :) *roll eyes* Guided Reading Group Format. The hours can pass so quickly when I start talking about school. How does that happen? The other night...it happened again! My friend, Jenny, from Luckeyfrog's Lilypad and I had a late night talking school. One of our topics...guided reading. She wanted to know how I had my routine set up and persuaded me to share. My guided reading groups are 30 minutes with anywhere from 4 to 7 kids. Now...let's dig deeper. My groups start with behavior rubrics and expectations. My instruction starts with Phonological Awareness. Then we move right into a quick phonics lesson. Then we talk about how these sounds come together to make words. Then we transition to sight words. So far, I have used up about 15 minutes of my guided reading group.
We are ready for the leveled reader. During the last couple of minutes of the group, I try to throw in some comprehension. We always end our group by discussing effort. Thanks for reading! Guided Reading and a Little Red Ribbon Week. I hope everyone is surviving Sandy! It's crazy...what a massive storm! I'm in central Ohio and it's been raining since yesterday. The winds just picked up like crazy about half an hour ago. Looks like they're currently gusting to around 40 mph.
I am warning you now: LOTS OF PICS! Last week we had Red Ribbon Week. The kiddos made pumpkin fold-overs and decorated the outside. Then they wrote a sentence inside about why drugs are scary. Next topic of conversation (sorry I don't have a good segue into this portion)...guided reading! After attending a couple SDE conferences and doing some research, I came up with the best option for the moment. So how do I start? I put the names up on the board in a flip chart I made. All they bring is a pencil and I provide the rest.
To get started, we review our high-frequency words. Then we move on to our "hunks and chunks" for the week. Next, we move onto our story! Then we read! And that's it! The wind is howling...off I go! Memorizing the Moments: March 2013. Xander is 28 Months Letter Clipping Shape Forests Matching the shapes on the jaguars to the name on the forest. Jaguar Number Cards I mixed it up again this week with the number cards! I used a hole punch to make a hole in the square where the number tile goes on each card. Jaguar Size Sort Lacing Alphabet Pegs Making the jaguar climb the pegs on the J. Other Tot School ActivitiesLittle Reader Sight Words Balloon Popping I had wrote some words on balloons and let Xander pop them with a ballooon after he read the word. All ready to play again. He said "WHOA" after every pop! Reading some books.
Landmarks I got out the map from our Treasure Hunt Game and put the landmarks where they go. <a HREF=" Brightly Beaming Resources: Week #10 Trains. We've been having fun with trains this week since that is Shrade's #1 love right now. Daddy even took him downtown to see the trains as well as we have a train track right next to our house. The other weekend they had a steam train come through! We've also been having our "lessons" up in the new room! I like a change of scenery besides the living room. Thomas the Train Lapbook: from 1+1+1=1 (We don't have a color printer, but it still works!) I got this printout from Lightning Bug Literacy. This lapbook has matching shape cards, numbers, 1-1 correspondence (colored train circles), book, letter recognition (TRAIN) with matching.
Books we read: *Also a book called Let's Go that had two stories: Hello Freight Train and Little Red Caboose Music: This CD has a song called "Little Red Caboose" We also used the lesson from Totally Tots (Once Upon a Book) about The Little Engine That Could . For letter J I decided to start a craft with Letter of the Week at No Time for Flashcards. Rhyming Words. Guess what? We have a brand new “Singable Book” to add to our collection: it’s the Opposite Rhyming Songbook! And it also has its own project for kids to make their own Opposite Rhyming Songbook, too! You can listen to the new song that goes with it on iTunes, but watch out: just a snippet of that song, and you won’t be able to get it out of your head all day long! Keep reading for some free samples of the project and flash cards below. This book was illustrated by Jessica Dunn, who is the daughter of a dear friend of mine, and so that makes this book EXTRA special!
I love the way it turned out! I brought a set of these new Opposite Rhyming Songbooks to the first grade classroom that I have been helping out in, along with a new learning center activity that I made to go with it. This is what I did. By the time I was halfway through the book, most of the children had caught on to the pattern and were happily reading and singing along with me. An Opposites Literacy Center Activity. Middle Sound Cups- and How to Teach Kids to Find the Middle Sound of a Word. Today I am going to tell you about a new idea called CVC Cups that I have been experimenting with for the last couple of months! CVC Cups helps kids practice finding the middle sounds of CVC words.
My kids really like this activity, and I hope that yours will, too! Meanwhile, I want you to know that Teaching Blog Addict is turning TWO YEARS OLD Today!!! There is a BIG birthday party going on starting today with TONS of freebies, so you’ll want to go check it out for sure. To prepare this activity, you will need to find some clear cups and some solid colored cups. I got my colored cups from the Party City store in my town, and then found them at this link. One disadvantage of the clear cups that I found is that they are not flexible, and some of them have already cracked, so if you go with this brand, you will probably want to have a few extras on hand to replace the ones that break.
To make the cups:1. Now for the hard part: Teaching Kids to Find the Middle Sound of a Word 1. Sounding Out and Making New Words with the New Sounds Fun Word Building Kit! I’ve been waiting a long time for this kit, and I am super excited to be able to share it with you now! I put this project on my wonderful husbands (very long) “to do list” a few months ago, and it finally made its way to the top of the list. So I now finally have my wonderful Sounds Fun Word Building Kit! I’m only sorry that there is so little time left in the year to make use of it. The Sounds Fun Word Building Kit gives children a way to practice building, writing, sounding out, and reading words with the Sounds Fun Phonics spelling patterns. To use the kit, all you need to do is make copies of the alphabet cards and the Sounds Fun Word Building Kit cards necessary for the word families that you are working on.
Then you can either provide the children with a list of words that you want them to work on building, or give them pictures of the words that you want them to build by using the flash cards from the Sounds Fun Workbooks. How to Do a Guided Sort (Spelling Activity) I share a lot of spelling (word work/word study) resources on this blog, and there is one activity that is really at the heart of this approach to teaching spelling - the sort. I highly recommend any of these books. Each book contains very detailed descriptions for how to do sorts - often including sample scripts, and step by step diagrams. But here is my much shorter introduction. I'm going to use word features from the Within Word stage as examples in this post. Write a comment below if you'd like me to provide examples from the Letter Name stage.
You can find an overview of the Spelling Stages (with links to the actual cards that you would use in the sort) with this link. Try an Open-Ended Free Sort First If your child has never done any real sorting before - or has never sorted in this context (at home with you with spelling cards), then you might like to do an open-ended sort. You never know! A Guided Sort I always begin a sorting activity by pre-selecting the cards I want to use.
Phonics | Teaching My Baby To Read. I recently came across a blog called Out in Left Field whose author espouses the polar opposite of all my views on educational theory. Katharine Beals, PhD, rails against Balanced Literacy Instruction and Constructivist math in particular. Here are links to my own views on why I love Balanced Literacy Instruction and Constructivist math. Katherine Beals takes shots at Bill Gates whom she describes as being misguided, misinformed, and possibly having Asperger’s Syndrome. She also rails against Stanford University professor Keith Devlin, also known as “The Math Guy” on NPR. I haven’t read any of Professor Devlin’s books, but I now want to read all of them! Teaching with a point of view is not bad, not mater which pedagogy you choose.
If you give me a group of well-fed, middle class Kindergarteners from moderately stable homes I will teach them to read. Educators have to teach whatever curriculum the school district hands them. P.S. Word Work and Phonics. Okay! Okay! I know. I tend to post about Daily 5 Word Work a lot. Over the past couple of years, I noticed my kids would get bored with Word Work about 1/2 way through the school year. I knew I needed to come up with a variety of manipulatives that I could change out from time to time, so their interest wouldn't fade. I wanted to keep it exciting and engaging, so last summer I was on a mission to find and/or create a variety of supplies.
Here are a few of the options my students have to use right now: Who would have known how exciting the Crayola Dry Erase Board Set could be?! My kids love them! I found these gel letters online. They love building their words with these on small plates I purchased from Walmart. Here is a look at the gel letter box. It makes it easier for my students to find the letters they need. I purchased these individual, small pocket charts from Target. These letters are organized in alphabetical order too! I also have a "job" for them too.
They love the Hollywood theme! Teaching Short and Long Vowels. Did anyone else notice how school started again? Anyway, here's some tips on how to teach short and long vowels to students. I teach first graders and many of them need a lot of phonics instruction. But don't tune out if you don't teach first graders because there are plenty of 2nd, 3rd, and 4th graders who need basic phonics help as well. Teachers tend to stop teaching phonics explicitly to students after 1st grade or so, but don't be one of them! Some students struggle for a very long time simply because they weren't taught phonics explicitly for long enough. Granted, many students won't need it to help them read fluently. This is a fun and effective way to teach what long and short vowels are, and how to decode CVC and CVCE words. Here's what you'll need: 5 pencils 5 strips of different colored card stock Tape Step One: Make Vowel Cards Step Two: Practice Short and Long Vowels with Students I start with the letter A.
Step Three: Demonstrate Short and Long Vowels in Words. Introducing Vocabulary and a Freebie! Phonics Lessons - West Virginia Reading First.