Phonics Phun!

September 09, 2016
"Get those littles to read!"

Phonics is such an important foundational skill that students need. Phonics allows children to be able to read and the ability to read then allows them to take even more ownership of their learning. 

A strong foundation of the phonemic sounds is imperative!! 

Phonics is a big focus in my classroom.  We do many different activities to constantly reinforce the skills the students have learned.

Each week we learn a new phonics sound.  To introduce the phonics sounds, I share with the students a story.  For example, the story of Nat the alligator who LOVES apples!


After that story, we add our new phonics sound to our phonics board.

Then we come up with a phonics chant that incorporates movement (something we as a class come up with to help us remember the sound) and words to help us remember the sound.  We also create an anchor chart with words that we can think of that have that vowel sound.     


Then each morning for the remaining days of the week, the students walk in and begin working on their Phonics Interactive Notebooks.  
You can get the short A Phonics Notebook freebie here.

 During the week, typically during literacy stations/Daily 5, the students hunt for words in their books and/or around the classroom.  They need to find 10 words throughout the week.  Depending on the week, this is sometimes a fast finishers activity.  I love these word hunts because they begin to see the sounds in their world around them and the hunts are also super easy to differentiate.  



During literacy stations/Daily 5, students also have an opportunity to complete games and puzzles based on the the phonics sound of that week AND the previous phonics sounds we have learned.


At the end of the week, each student creates a phonics visual that was connected to the story that we had read at the beginning of the week and incorporates their word hunt. 
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First Grade Short I Activity

September 24, 2016
It's a raining day here so I thought I would light a few of my absolute FAVORITE fall candles and write a little bit about what we did in phonics this week.  
If you have not ever had these candles before, you MUST try them!! The pumpkin spice scent is my absolute favorite!! It just smells like Fall! 

This week my first graders spent learning about the short I phonics sound.  We ended the week by creating these short I mittens.  The students LOVED this activity! As I was prepping the next step of the craft I overheard one little boy saying "oh, I think we are going to be able to wear these mittens! Cool!!" They were SO engaged which meant that they really were on the look for the phonics aspect of the craft (because that allowed them to then make the mitten).  I would definitely recommend integrating phonics visuals into your phonics curriculum if you do not already do them - they first graders look forward to them, enjoy them, and form a connection to refer to when thinking about the phonics lessons.  


     
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PhOnics

October 01, 2016
Short O PhOnics

My students have been LOVING our phonics crafts - from the bAgs to the vEsts to the mIttens to the "pet" Octopus (which can apparently also be worn as bracelets according to one of my sweet firsties)! Each week they make my teacher heart smile with how excited they get about the activities.  

 We started with our word hunt Friday morning and then made our octopus to help us remember the short O sound.


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Hey, ShortE!

September 17, 2016
I love, love, LOVE our First Grade phonics activities! The students are always so engaged with the stories, the activities, and love the craftivities that accompany the units!!

This week we were learning all about the Eggsellent Short E sound.  We read about Ted's Egg Adventure, hunted for colored eggs that were hidden in the hallways of our school, sorted the eggs between "good eggs" and "bad eggs" (good eggs had a short e word inside, bad eggs had a word with no short e), and made Short E Egg Vests to remind us of our fun adventures learning about the short E sound! 

The Egg Vest consists of a short E word hunt (glued on the back).  They then chose some of these short E words that they found, wrote those words on the eggs, drew an illustration, and then assembled! 

 You can get templates for the vest and other short E activities here.

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On the 4th day of First Grade...

August 28, 2017

one of my sweet firsties called out "does anyone know how to help me get syrup from breakfast out of my hair?" #bless

Also today, we explored math pattern blocks and practiced our counting my completing these adorable math pattern block pictures.

Other pictures students made were: emojis, sailboats, flowers, spaceships, houses. 

Then we continued our ABC order phonics unit by learning how to put words into ABC order. We started by simply putting the ABCs in ABC order. Then we learned how to sort words into ABC order by sorting some class words. 



THEN we practiced sorting words on our own and the rest of the week the students were able to complete this type of work independently.  YAY for independence!! 
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A Week In Review

October 07, 2016
This week...

Our craftivity came from here.
Our phonics practice came from here.

We finished up setting and learned about characters this week.

A lot of our comparing numbers activities came from this packet.
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Two for Tuesday

August 28, 2017
Favorite From Today #1
So last night, I had a spur of the moment "IDEA." My beginning of year lessons are so much "read book then do craft." I love this because the books all emphasize some type of life skill (persevering, working as a team) as so the students really get the foundation for starting the year but I just wanted something a little more exciting for our 2nd day. 


So, right after recess we headed to our campus IDEA lab (aka Makerspace lab)! Now, I typically do these types of lessons in my classroom but this space offers students the opportunity to use a green scree, drimel saw, 3-D printer, & more. So it is definitely a place we visit several times during the year and it's important they are introduced to the place. 



We began our lesson by reading this adorable book! It is absolutely PERFECT for these types of lessons! It talks about the entire process of creating a physical version of what you can imagine. After we came up with agreements about how people should behave in the idea lab, the students began to use materials such as paper towel rolls, tape, cups, pom-poms, etc. to make "The Most Magnificent Thing" they could think of!

I was SO IMPRESSED with their creativity & problem solving skills!! They made pom-pom bracelets, purses, baskets, pencil holders, binoculars, ships, and more! Just by trial and error, students learned that putting glue on one side of tape does not make tape stick to stuff but that rolling the tape allows both sides to be sticky! It was such a special day & definitely one of my favorites! Made me excited to go to teach that day! The students LOVED this too - the next day they all said "do we get to go back there today?!"

Favorite From Today #2

We also started our phonics unit by refreshing our knowledge of the alphabet. The students created this classroom alphabet - one of my favorite things to have up in my classroom! 



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