The sequel to Wild Robot comes out today and we couldn't be more excited about it. Our copy is arriving by 8pm from our friend Mr. Amazon. When are you getting your copy. We sure hope soon! We know some 4th graders who are going to be fighting over this one when it arrives!!!! 

This week we worked on creating our own Alphabet Book pages to help us master some of those illusive letters' names and sounds.  We even added Ella's "face" for Ff and Izzy's "nose" for Nn.  Fun!  Can't wait to print these out to publish!

The first to finish up her ABC necklace!!! That means she knows ALL her Uppercase Letters!!!! GO BAY GO!!! She's been slowly collecting and viola!!!!! SO proud of you Bay!

When internalizing decoding rules, a little "method acting" can prove to be useful!  Give a group of kiddos card with letters so that they may become that letter and say their letter sound.  Add Bossy, Shy, Magical E (a multi-handled little letter.) He/she does not want to say its name and will make the vowel on the other side of the consonant make it say its name instead so it can be silent!  Have the children take turns being this Shy, Silent E so that everyone can better internalize the spelling and reading rule. **Remember, spelling is one of the three branches of the literacy tree:  it supports both reading and writing!  :)

Here's our "after" picture after a snowball fight with our compound words. No snow required, just crumpled up parts of words. We threw them around and then practiced reading them. This really helps develop an understanding of breaking apart words and what words are compound and what words are not. An awareness of syllables and how those break can come from practice with these things too! 

We're going on a bear hunt!!!! Wait, NO! A letter hunt! :) Students hid tiny tiny letters in this jar of beans and rescued them from bean land!!! I don't know who had more fun, them or us! Try this with rice, couscous, any sort of mixing material that can hide well! You could also put inside a water bottle or mason jar and have students hake it around to try and find the letters. After each letter was rescued, we reviewed it's name and sound and recorded it on our letter hunt sheet. Try this during centers! 

Kindergarten students used Pom Poms to fill in letter pictures to help make associations between letter names and sounds. You can try this too, click here! 

2nd graders are working on vowel pairs, so we made our own and used our problem solving skills to work together to communicate about where each vowel should go to make a "real" vowel pair. 

The next day, we made vowel pairs/teams with wiki sticks! See, they're great for ALL grade levels and ANY task. 

Here we are in the Vowel Pairs Parking Lot!  As a review, we parked our cars on various vowel pairs that "say" a specific sound.