Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Making Words

 I don't know about you, but with First grade one of our favorite activities we do every Thursday is titled, "Making Words." I give the students a set of letters. These are already divided into baggies. The students are being Detectives and have to figure out the "mystery word!" In order to do this, the child has to make all different size words with the letters involved in the mystery word. The kids love it, at times it is challenging but we make it lots of fun.

I usually partner the students up for this activity. After about 10 or 15 minutes of making words with their partner we then go to whole group and make giant list of words we all came up with! We sort them by 1 letter, 2 letter, 3 letters and so on. We look at the similarities in the words with onsets and rimes, we look at word families, vowel sounds and so much more.

The problem with my Making Words activity was the sheet was boring.. so I jazzed up the paper we record on. I have never posted a paper like this so I will try to do so properly!

 If you would like, you can email me at sweetexpectations8@yahoo.com

I tried to download it a few different ways... let me know if it works!!

My new Making Words Paper!
Making Words
Making Words

Friday, February 11, 2011

Trying it out!

After starting my own personal blog, Sweet Expectations... I thought it would be fun to start to a second blog about one of the biggest loves in my life: TEACHING!

I have taught for 5 years. Two of those were in Kindergarten and the rest in First Grade. I absolutely love my job - to me it is a passion and I don't feel like I go to work everyday. I think I am a very fortunate person to not have to "work." I enjoy my daily life as a teach!

This blog is to post any little teacher ideas that I have had or used in my classroom. They may not be anything ground or wonderful - but they have worked in my room and maybe they will in yours!

Happy Teaching!