Summer is right around the corner, and parents everywhere are starting to ask teachers can you PLEASE keep them longer?! what they can have their students do over the summer to keep their school skills solid? We're so glad they ask! One of easiest answers we give is, have them read. One of the easiest things we give them to encourage reading is a Summer Reading Log. There's just something about copying and folding activities into booklets that bait our students time and again...Case in point - ... VIEW POST
Summer Reading Logs
Read Across America Activities for the Primary Classroom
Many primary classrooms love celebrating Read Across America week. Although our class celebrates Literacy each and every day, we like to get extra wild and wacky during Reading Week each year. Here are a few of our favorite activities to celebrate literacy and Read Across America in the primary classroom. Got Books? From Costco to Target. Garage sales to dumpster diving (True story, not proud.)...We've got a ridiculous amount of Dr. S books for Read Across America Week! Before we gathered our ... VIEW POST
Vocabulary Activities for Little Learners ~ Big Brain Words
A few years ago, we sat in a Professional Development meeting faced with the challenge of bringing robust vocabulary to the forefront of our primary classroom. It seemed such a BIG task for such little brains, but one that we agreed was imperative to teaching today’s learners. We spent over a year planning, creating, testing, editing, and analyzing the implementation of our program, Big Brain Words, with our own students. What we discovered was, not only was implementing a purposeful, ... VIEW POST
Student Dictionaries ~ Phonics Printables
We hit the classroom floor running at the beginning of the school year to help our students master their letter sounds. One of our favorite year long activities (No, that's not a typo...This lasts pretty much the entire school year for our class) for practicing our phonics skills is My Letter Sound Dictionary. We recently pulled it out to prep for the coming school year and noticed it needed a major metamorphosis. We are so excited about what emerged! This unit got a major overhaul. The ... VIEW POST
Interactive Phonics Readers ~ R-Controlled Vowels + a Book Bag Freebie
We are so excited that our class is reading up a storm! We're diving into those R-controlled vowels this week and we've just finished up our latest set of Interactive Phonics Readers to help our first graders out. They just can't get enough of these little books, and now that we've made our way through the short vowels, long vowels and digraph sets, they are Interactive Phonics Pros right about now. True story... We asked a parent volunteer to run this station the other day. About halfway ... VIEW POST
Fluency Building Bookmarks & Comprehension Cards
We spend oodles and oodles of time teaching kids how to read. We build words, break words, even make and take words. You get the picture...We spend a whole lot of time decoding. Decoding is reading, right? No, not quite... When we left for Spring Break our kids were cracking any code we put in front of them. They were decoding up a storm. It was the best robotic, cave person talk we've ever heard. But, it lacked 2 major things...fluency and comprehension. It was troubling us...A ... VIEW POST
