I'm linking up with the Reading Crew to promote literacy this summer!  We were hoping that people would head back to school in the fall with lots a plethora of ideas to implement in the classroom!

I went through my archive of posts and am sharing my favorite ideas!

During school-wide intervention time, in grades K-1, when teachers are teaching phonemic awareness, they are focusing on the following skills:

• concept of spoken words (clapping for each word in a sentence)
• rhyming
• beginning sounds
• segmenting onset and rhyme 
• segmenting words
• changing words based on initial sounds
• changing words based on ending sounds
• blending words 

In 10 minutes, you can pack quite a bit into a phonics/phonemic awareness RTI lesson.    When students come to me we work on both phonemic awareness and some phonics.   I base my lessons on the "letter and sound work" in Next Step in Guided Reading.

Learning Targets:
1)  I can identify the beginning sound of a word.
2)  I can identify the ending sound of a word.
3)  I can write the letter that corresponds to a beginning sound.
4)  I can make word families.

Students use the alphabet line that hangs in the room for support.  They also have their own Kindergarten Helper by Michelle Oaks.  This is probably my favorite TPT purchase.  Each student has their own personal anchor chart!

To practice beginning sounds I show picture cards and we do a round robin.  Students collect the cards they answer correctly.  Then they get a dry erase board, and write the beginning sound.

To practice the ending sound repeat the same process.

Then we get out the white boards and we play "show down."  As I show a picture card, students write the letter.  Students hide their answers until everyone is done, and then I point to a student to say "Show Down." Then all students share their board with the group.

When we are practicing CVC words.  Students get picture cards and start making a list of the words.

Then they pick their favorite word (and they get another dry erase board) and make a list of words with that word family.

Last year, when I went through 6 years of data at our building, and it was the best data (and this was a challenging group of students).

Additional Resources
I made these dice from the Dollar Tree into consonants and vowels.  Students roll words...in this version, they only wrote down read words on the dry erase board.

One of my "go to" resources is always  the FCCR.  I have found so many different ways to use their ideas!  In the picture below, each student has a bag of words, and they get to "point" to the word that rhymes with the word I say.  The students love getting to use the "pointer"!  That has been a GREAT Dollar Store find :)

Another resource I like is Phonemic Awareness: Playing with Sounds to Strengthen Beginning Reading Skills.  Not only are there TONS of ideas that can easily be used without making copies.  This sound bag idea is from the book.  I also like sending bags home, and letting students bring in objects from home.

Check back each week for more great reading ideas!

 

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Literacy Without Worksheets

I'd like to thank four awesome bloggers for creating the TpT Seller Challenge:

Teach Create Motivate, Third in Hollywood, Peppy Zesty Teacherista, and Sparkling in Second.

This weeks topic was Dare to Dream!!! 

College Fund

This is TOTALLY practical, but I always save a set amount of my TPT income and it goes into my children's college fund each month.  Many of my teacher friends that are just out of college have so much debt to payback, and it is hard for them to get their bills paid and pay student loans on a beginning teacher's salary.

Home Remodeling Projects

 In the past year, our house needed exterior work (new windows and new roof).  Those aren't very exciting projects.  This is just a wish list of things that I want to do to help fix up my home!

New carpet

New banister on our stairway

Master bathroom remodel

Build a sunroom off of our kitchen

This is my Pinterest Board for my home projects

Travel

  My family loves to travel!  My children have been traveling with us since they were four weeks old, and they are INCREDIBLE travelers. We'd love to go to Alaska, Europe, and Asia.  

My ultimate travel dream would be to sell our house and pretty much everything we own, and live on a sailboat in the Caribbean.  This probably isn't realistic until my youngest goes to college (in 8 years).  

Bring Joy to Children

There are lots of great organizations in my town that help those less fortunate.   

I would love to be able to buy books for a classroom library at an at-risk preschool.  

Provide a field trip for an entire grade level to someplace educationally awesome!

Fund a teacher's Donor Choose project.

Purchase new bikes for children that attend the Boys and Girls Club.

Provide funds at the YMCA that would pay the registration fee for basketball to children that couldn't afford this fee.

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Literacy Without Worksheets

When Michael's had 60% off some of their chalkboard line of crafts, my daughter and I stocked up (the items I bought were between 97 cents and 1.50).  We had fun decorating them.

My mother-in-law made me this sack that holds plastic grocery bags.  I just had it in my vacuum closet, because I didn't know where to hang it.  This hook was perfect.  It is now in the laundry room.

These four coasters were 97 cents!!  They've come in handy this summer.  

In our basement, we have a pool table.  My daughter helped me with this sign.

These cubes were a Dollar Tree bargain!  I used them for a phonics game that students will play in the fall.  My son had fun practicing his words!  I'm working on a phonics blog post, so these were perfect.

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Literacy Without Worksheets

I'm super excited to be linking up with the Reading Crew for a summer blog hop with lots of freebies and great ideas.  Make sure to keep hopping...we have a great giveaway for you at the last stop!

My focus is on emerging literacy.  I like having read the room cards where students can use a clipboard and keep track of the words/sentences they find.

In this freebie, students can find different sentences related to summer.  These sentences can also be used as a quick warm-up during guided reading (if you are teaching summer school).

In addition, if students need extra practice reading sight words, these cards are full of sight words!

The next stop is Stacy at Teacher's Take Out!

The fun doesn't end today!!! The rest of the summer on Wednesday's we will be sharing ideas on the weekly topics.  All are welcome to join in with blog posts and/or comments!  This is the weekly schedule.  

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Literacy Without Worksheets

I made this binder for the TPT conference in Las Vegas.  I downloaded the presentation slides for each session and copied them on card stock.   Then I printed the pages I needed from Easy Teaching Tools' conference planner! Office Depot added a clear cover, binding, and a hardish back cover.  I'm ready to go!!!

The tabs are:
Getting Ready
Vegas
Thursday
Friday
Reflection

I also have business cards from GoPrint.  Zazzle helped me out in making address labels, stickers, a notebook, and a button!

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Literacy Without Worksheets

 It's week one of the TPT Seller Challenge and this week's challenge is to choose a product and update it.  I was so excited, because last week, I did this!!!!  I had received quite a few requests to make some of my files editable.  That was my last week project!

I now have four collections that you can edit:  Classic, Happy, Fun, and Round

The Classy Collection includes chevron binders and spines as well as labels for the classroom.  The labels come in two sizes.

The Happy Collection includes binders and spines as well as labels for the classroom.  This collection includes fun Melonheadz clipart.

The Fun Collection includes binders and spines and labels (in one size), in fun polka dot colors. 

Finally, the Round Collection was created for making a word wall.  It includes word wall labels, labels for the classroom, and a template for word wall words.

Important Item Number 2

I love being able to offer all the items in my store in one bundle.  The issue I’ve run into is that it is getting too big to be stored on TPT.

To help alleviate this problem, any new items posted after 6-10-15, will be available in a Dropbox file that you will be able to access.

There will be a word document in the TPT downloaded file titled IMPORTANT

DROPBOX INFORMATION.

Anytime I update the store, I will make sure to update the TPT file, so it will notify you through the My Purchases tab.

It makes me so happy to be able to offer teachers this option.  I've received some great feedback on this file, and I know that lots of teachers and students are benefiting from this option!

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Literacy Without Worksheets

I love to read!! I always have a book with me.  In fact, I have so many books on my summer reading list, I divided them into "fun" and "professional."  I'm linking up with Lucky to Be in First.

Fun

I'm on the library waiting list for all these books...in the meantime I'm focusing on my professional reading :)  

I highly recommend these books.  I have about 100 more great books I could recommend, but these were my standouts from the last six months :)

Professional

I'm hoping to get through all of them this summer.  I started with The Writing Thief.  Since I am mentoring four new teachers next year, Supporting Beginning Teachers will be next!

 These two books are great for summer!!  They will energize and inspire you heading into the next school year :)

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Literacy Without Worksheets

I have found that having volunteers work with students during fluency work stations is a win-win for everyone!  To keep it organized, I like having a fluency crate.  I have copies of the pages I want students to work on.  It is just a matter of changing some of the pages from the fluency books.

1)  Our reading series has weekly fluency passages for students.  That's something they always practice twice.  They have these copies with them.

2)  There is a folder in the crate devoted to fluency phrases.  The students run through the phrases with the volunteers.  Then they can use the Voice & Expression cards from Cara Caroll.  The students love reading the cards using different expressions and voices.    (See picture below).

Other Options

Students like doing the Roll, Read, Highlight from Rock Your Fluency!

Another option are these read aloud passages from Scholastic.  These also have comprehension questions that students can work on with the volunteers.   They have their own folder in the crate.  I only put one at a time in the folder, so I know who has done which ones.

Students enjoy these You Read to Me, I'll Read to You stories.  These are another option in the crate.

At the end of the work station time, they use this rubric (download for free) to evaluate how they are doing on the fluency rubric.

Practicing fluency is a great way to keep volunteers busy, and students are able to practice reading with an adult that can be a great model for them!

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Literacy Without Worksheets

This week wasn't very exciting!  In between being a carpool mom to multiple dance classes, baseball practice, baseball games, and summer musical tryouts (and then rehearsals), I really worked on cleaning my house.  I still have a ways to go, but it really needed some deep cleaning love!!! I also went through my children's closet and drawers - plus their old toys!!!

This was also a pretty cool basket to go next to the tv in the basement.  It is sturdy canvas and it is structured.  It was also on sale at Michaels for $9.99 (before my teacher discount).  I love it because it is tall (it comes to almost my knees)!

I did get two things accomplished besides cleaning :)

These book ends were given to me years ago. I decided to reuse them and created updated book ends!

 Before

 After

The cork & symbols were $3.59 this week at Michaels!!!  They also had them in galvanized metal and denim.  I liked the look of the cork.  The bears were tied on, so when I untied them, the main part was completely perfect :)  Then I just hot glued the "&" on the base and voila...new book ends!

This was something that I needed to finish up to complete my Build It!  Draw it!  Write it! Bundle.  This is 28 pages with digraphs.  Students have to cut up the mixed up sentence and then put it back together.  They also have to draw a picture and write the sentence they built.

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Literacy Without Worksheets