Build a Sandwich

Who doesn't love sandwiches????  I am SUPER excited about this yummy activity. Recently, I have started working with a group of kinders who need some help with letter recognition. Well the creative juices started flowing and along with some great clip art by Krista Walden, Laura from Whimsy Clips, and Lidia Barbosa this little project was

born. I created two packets one for CVC words and another for letter recognition. I couldn't resist working on both of these for the various groups I work with.

  First, I printed off the sandwich pieces on cardstock, laminated, and began cutting out the pieces. I only cut out the dotted lines on the pieces of the sandwiches with the beginning letter sounds. 

After everything was cut out, then I began laying out these sandwiches and creating fun new CVC words. 

Once all the sandwiches were created , my little learners will create their sandwiches and then record the words they make on their sheets. 

For my Alphabet pack and CVC pack there are white and wheat sandwiches with all of the fun fixings. 

And this is how they look with their sandwich toppers.  Cute right???

If you like what you see you can click on these pictures and head on over and pick them up.  You can purchase individual packs or a bundle of the two packs. 

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Holiday E-book is up at Teachers Pay Teachers

I am beyond EXCITED!!!!  I wanted to share with you all the Teachers pay Teachers holiday E-books are out.  If you are not familiar with the book.  Each year sellers get together and send in links to their free products and share a holiday tip with you.  This year yours truly was a part of the Pre-K/K edition of the book.  I am heading over to download the book and check out all of the holiday freebies. This freebie is included for you to download.

I am so thankful for my buyers and followers....this is our way to say thank you.  Head on over and download it today.  You will see my Elf calendar in there .  A lot of fun to use in the classroom if you have a little Elf come visit your room before the holidays. 

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Halloween wrap up and a freebie

Headed into November already!!! I can not believe it. I know I promised a little October freebie this month. I don't know what happen this month but it got right past me in no time. However, I can not let my faithful blog followers down. So , I am sharing with you an ADORABLE thing one of the teachers did with my own kiddos at school. I added to the activity by creating a little alphabet order handout that you could use to keep your students engaged to prep for the activity. I did find it easier to have all of the materials separated into individual bags and labeled.
Here is what you will need.
 A large black pot/cauldron
  Plastic bags-labeled with ingredients
Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal
Pretzel sticks
M&M's
Dried craisins
Marshmallows
Chow Mein Noodles
  Chocolate chips
  Candy Corn
Then give all the ingredients a fun name like Ghost poop, pumpkin guts, and cat whiskers through all of the chuckles of the students. They LOVED IT!!! Have each student pick a plastic bag and dump it into the black cauldron. After all of it is mixed together place into a fun , festive individual bags to send home or snack on in class. So much fun. Here is the little freebie I promised to you.

Looking forward to the month of giving Thanks. Stop on by for a little thanks to all of my readers.


Julie

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Back to School and a Freebie-Week 3

Back again for a little sight word freebie and back to school celebration.  I wanted to share one of the ways we review sight words at home.  This is a quick and easy review to do right before bedtime. 



First, we lay out all of the words we are working on.  I don't typically give more than 10 at a time to learn.  I turn all the cards over and my kiddo is ready to play. 

Second, the cards are flipped over and if my kiddo reads it right then it goes in their pile....if not the card is mine...ha ha ha (evil laughter)  just kidding.  :)  Of course that adds a little competition to it so they can beat mom. 


Finally the cards are tallied up and sometimes I even throw in a few that we have already mastered just to make sure they are still on the mastered list. 

And now for the freebie.....a little more apple fun with Pre-Primer sight words.  Enjoy.  Head on back next Sunday for the final back to school freebie. 

Have a great week. 

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WoRd FaMiLiEs -InTeRaCtIvE NoTeBoOkS

I have to admit it.   I love interactive notebooks.  Many years ago when I moved from third grade down to kindergarten I had my little kinders make and use interactive notebooks.  Other teachers thought I was crazy because at the time they didn't think I could keep them all straight and organized for my littlest learners.  Well I was out to prove them wrong and I did.  :)  Well I hope I did.  :)
  So when I received a newsletter for my own littlest learner classroom saying they were going to be working on word families...a light bulb went off.  I created these word family packets and thought how could I resize them to fit into a composition notebook.  Some printers allow you to shrink them down to 85% but my printer did not.

So here is what I did .  I opened up the PDF file and pressed file and print. 

 Click on Page Setup.  The next option is to choose the size of the paper.  I chose Executive and it worked perfectly for what I had planned. 

It turned out to be a great way for my kiddo to keep all the paperwork together and get a little practice with me at home. 

If you like what you see you can pick up these packets in my store. 

 

Get them for 10% off today and tomorrow in my store. Short o and u are coming.

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Back to School and a Freebie -Week 2

Alright week 2 of our Back to School celebration! How is everyone doing? Just a little tired....I am by the end of the day. September is spent getting routines down and classroom policies in place . Once that is all done and learned then we can get started on the real heart of the curriculum. Last week, I shared with you a little sight word freebie and this week I am going to piggy back

on that and share the next part of my sight word piece by adding a little reading and highlighting to our sight word recognition. This freebie (click on freebie picture above)is allowing the students to read the sentences and color the apple where the word is found in the sentence. If you are looking for more sight word activities head on over to my Pinterest board (click on picture of my board above )and you will find all kinds of activities using sight words and all the other little goodies I have found for teaching.

Have a great week!

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Back to School and a Freebie

Saying farewell to summer is always hard for me. The carefree days are slowly pushed aside with schedules, time constraints, and a new start. Don't get me wrong I love what I do...I just cherish those carefree days. I wanted to celebrate a few things as we all headed back to school.

Over the summer I reached a milestone in my TpT store and I thought my great blog readers deserved something free. To celebrate back to school I decided to share some freebies with all of you every Sunday throughout September. So come back every Sunday this month and pick up a freebie. All this month I am going to give you a little sight word freebie. At the end of this collection of freebies one lucky reader will win something new I am working on. I know you will like it. Here is a question for you: Did you know that sight words make up 50-70% of the words found in a text? I truly believe that a student with strong sight word recognition will become a successful fluent reader. Now, that is not the only component of reading. Many other skills are equally as important. Click on the picture below and grab your freebie. And a continued thanks for following me. ;) See ya next Sunday.

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Comprehension

After working with two great groups of readers this year, I tried to focus on several skills that they were struggling with.  One of the areas we worked on heavily was the skill of comprehension.  Comprehending what we read can be tricky for struggling readers because if the passage is too hard or they struggle to decode the words they are reading then comprehension is lost or difficult for them. 

So here are some tips that I used to help my readers practice the skill of comprehending what they read. 

1.  Short passages

Some of my readers were first graders reading on a kindergarten reading level.  We began reading short passages that had a lot of high frequency words easily recognized and short simple stories that helped them remember what they were reading about. 

2.  Picture Walks

Before we began any type of reading we would walk through a text full of colorful illustrations that depicted the story.  This helped ease any fears of not knowing what the story was about.  This also helped them recall some facts or things they knew prior to reading. 

3.  Visualize, Visualize, Visualize

I recently read a great article and a tip on how to make the skill of comprehension a little easier.  This is a great read.  During my reading sessions with my little readers we would stop during the story and visualize what the story was doing.  We would also visualize for a moment or infer what might happen next. Click on the picture to read this article from The Struggling Homeschooler. 

4.  Teach several strategies

Another great resource I found was this chart found at wiki-teacher.com.  I plan on printing out this chart on cardstock and laminating them for my reading groups. I love this chart because the pictures will help my littlest emerging readers and give them a visual reminder of skills we will be working on when we need to comprehend what we are reading.   

Over the summer, I uploaded a packet that I used with my students this year to help with comprehension.  I created this because I often struggled finding short , easy to read passages, for my students to read and answer questions.  Head on over to my TpT store to get a free sample of it with 3 stories to use and then you can purchase the bigger packet with 20 more stories. 

Want to get the pack on sale????  Teachers Pay Teachers is having their huge Back to School Sale starting August 4-5th.  My store will be on sale along with additional savings from TpT.  Thanks to Scooting through Second for the cute banner!  Love it! 

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Medial Sounds-Phonics Instruction

Keep reading....freebie at the bottom for you.  :)  Follow my blog for more freebies . 

After working this year with a great group of students who needed a little extra help with reading I created an interactive activity to use with them to help them read and identify those medial or middle sounds.  I wanted to share with you a visual clue I use to help my little readers remember how to read words and identify the sounds they make. 

1.  We started off using very simple CVC words.  We wrote words like cat, bat, hat, on the board to start off.  In order to help us read the word in the whole group we used a visual clue to help us identify each sound.  This is something I use all the time to help them understand reading words from left to right.  I start off by turning my back to the class and modeling to them how the whole process works.  I raise my left hand and say this is where I start reading my word.  I say a word like cat and then tap my left shoulder as I say the "c" sound.

Clipart courtesy of Creative Clips

2.  Next, I say the next sound in the word of cat "a" and then tap the top of my head.  And since we are focusing on middle sounds I make sure I tell them that my head is the middle sound of the word and this is where we are listening for those sounds. It looks something like this. 

3.  And finally we get to the end of the word cat and identify the ending sound "t".  For this one we tap our right shoulder. 

After I model the whole word then I model going from left shoulder to right sounding out the word cat along the way as I use the visual cues I showed them to help them remember. 

4.   I stop and ask them where was the beginning sound find your beginning sound we all tap our left shoulders, then I ask where the middle "a" sound is and we all tap our heads , and finally we get to the ending sound and tap our right shoulders.  And then we all tap it together blending the sounds together . 

As we began our lesson using this method we also used this pack to go along with our activities and the kids had a blast using their cameras to find and make words using the correct middle sound. 

And just for you all here is a little freebie from the pack....just click to print your freebie out. 

Enjoy! 

 

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