language arts
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Friday Freebie
It’s Friday, which means it’s time for a freebie! This one is a great idea from Courtney Keimer. It’s a sensory alphabet book, each page has an upper and lowercase letter outline, along with a sensory material that begins with that particular letter. Students use glue and the suggested material to fill in each letter outline. I love this because it gives children a concrete example for each letter sound. Instead of drawing a picture, writing a word, or gluing in a magazine clipping, children actually get to handle the object that is associated with the letter sound, giving them a tangible example. I think that this is an awesome…
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Easy Alphabet Match Activity
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A back to school tip
I’ve put together a little back to school treat – a tip for helping children get excited about learning letters and starting to read, along with a great freebie. Please check out my freebie and feel free to share my tips! To download this document with clickable links please click here!
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When Sophie gets Angry
I’m linking up with Mrs. Jump’s Class for Deanna’s Let’s Talk About Books linky. I love learning about new books, and I love the opportunity to share my favorites with you! This is also perfect because the book that I want to tell you about today sets the tone for the rest of my posts this week. Last week I told you that I have a hard time choosing my favorite books, there are just too many that are amazing, and perfect for different seasons, themes, lessons, situations – you name it. When Sophie Gets Angry – Really Really Angry is one of my favorite social emotional stories, because it…
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Using Vocabulary Cards in the Preschool Classroom
I love vocabulary cards. I love them so much that I’ve designed my own and there are always some available in my classroom, but before I get ahead of myself, let me tell you why I love them. I started using vocabulary cards when my students showed an interest in working on their writing skills. They kept asking me how to spell certain words, and how to write specific letters. I eventually got tired of writing certain words over and over on scrap paper so that kiddos could see what the words looked like, so I wrote some on sentence strips. This was a start, but then they couldn’t find…
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Freebie Friday!
Happy Friday! I hope that you have something fun planned for the weekend, I’m trying on bridesmaid dresses with my sister today and helping host a bridal shower for my soon to be sister-in-law tomorrow, so I’m looking forward to a wedding-festivity-filled weekend! For this week’s Friday freebie I found a super cute ice cream themed activity that would go perfectly with the ice cream activities I shared yesterday. My students would absolutely love “We Scream for Ice Cream… Rhymes” by Jennifer Drake. Not only are her ice cream cones really cute, but I haven’t met a preschooler who didn’t like to rhyme, seriously, they will make up silly nonsense…
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End of the year skills post #2
Yesterday I introduced you to one of my favorite products for helping my kiddos jump into reading – something that they are very excited about right now! Today I want to share one of my newest products, that my students are loving. These are my CVC Word Family Ring Books. They are very similar to the paint chips, but each word family is on it’s own ring, helping to manage the chaos of all those letter cards. These are also color coded, to help make sure that the correct beginning letters stay with the intended word family. I do this to make sure that students can be successful – they…
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End of the year skills
The end of the school year in my classroom often means that many of my students are ready for activities that challenge them and introduce higher level skills. This is my favorite time of the year because they finally begin to understand why we have been doing all of this letter work for the last two or three years, the idea that letter sounds can blend together and create words, words that they can read all by themselves, is incredible to them. I love to see the sense of pride on their faces when they are able to read simple words after blending all of the individual sounds, so I…
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What’s in my writing center
I took a couple of weeks off from sharing my writing center, my students were really into my Easter options, so they stayed out for a little longer than I would typically keep them. If the children are choosing writing activities, I’m not putting those activities away! Here’s what I put out for this week: CVC Word eggs: Taking the hint from my kiddos, I found an activity that would continue the Easter fun without actually being Easter-themed. These are so easy to make. I chose a different color egg for each vowel/word family. On one side of the egg I wrote the word families, and on the other side…
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Alphabet book keepsakes
I’ve started thinking about our annual preschool graduation, and I have a couple of different ideas up my sleeve, but one thing that I always like to incorporate is a keepsake that shows how much the children have learned. This year my kiddos are going to create alphabet books with their own illustrations for each letter. We started working on them last week, doing a couple of letters whenever we get a chance. So far they are absolutely adorable. They are really putting a lot of effort into their books, and some of the illustrations that they have come up with are hilarious. When they get stuck I pull out…
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What’s in my Writing Center?
Here it is, another installment of “What’s in my Writing Center?” We are really focused on rain and the weather. My kiddos are obsessed with tornadoes, and I am trying to build a foundation for general understanding of the weather through our project work so that they can form a better foundation for what makes tornadoes. To me, this means giving them the vocabulary to use to talk about weather phenomena. I also love that I can use their interests to attract them to other activities! Here’s what in my Writing Center this week: Rain Boot Letter Match. This was one of my small group activities last week, but I…
