Sight Word Pancakes

Parents--this is probably my most favorite game that we play in our classroom! To practice for our weekly sight word test, every Thursday during our Word Work station we play this game (that I THOUGHT I made up, but after talking to a teacher friend at another elementary school--apparantly I'm not the first to come up with it) called Sight Word Pancakes. I like this game because it forces the students to think FAST about what the word is, which increases their automaticity. I make new "pancakes" each week and add them to the stack so that each week they still are given opportunities to practice previously tested sight words.
How to play:
- Turn over all of the pancakes so that you can't see the words.
- One person begins as the chef, who uses the spatula to flip over the first pancake.
- The first person to say the sight word out loud becomes the next chef, who flips over a new pancake!
- The game continues until all pancakes have been flipped over.

 

It's crazy what something as simple and cheap as a spatula will do to excite a child! They WANT to be the first to say each word so that they can hold that spatula!

Window Crayon Fun!

Ok people, so I was walking around Hobby Lobby the other day (one of my ABSOLUTE favorite stores, might I add) and came across this great find:

Crayola Window Crayons! Why have I never seen these before? I had to pick these up for my classroom when I saw them. We used these window crayons a few days ago during our Imagination Station (where students use their imagination to become authors and illustrators) to reinforce words with the short i sound. I printed off some clip art pictures of words with the /i/ sound and placed them in a Ziploc bag. One by one, each student reached his/her hand in the bag and pulled out a picture. They were instructed to determine what the picture was, and attempt to spell the word on the window with a window crayon. This activity is similar to the Sound Muncher, but we completed it on a different day to continue to reinforce that /i/ sound. Parents, this would be SUCH a fun way to study at home for our spelling test each week! Here are some examples of /i/ words our students wrote with the window crayons:

Our students sure are SUPER spellers! I can tell they are truly thinking about how these words should be spelled. Check out "ship" in the picture above and "chin" in the picture below! We have not even covered the sh- and ch- spelling chunks yet and these students are already understanding the letters that make those two sounds! I'm also especially proud of the student who wrote the word "brick" below because we have been learning the /ck/ sound and this student knew that brick ended in those two letters! Keep up the FANTASTIC work, first graders!

Beach Ball Reading Comprehension

Hey parents! Sorry it's taken me so long to post again. This long weekend has been hard to get over! :) Anyway, here is a reading comprehension strategy that we used last week to assess the students on what they remembered from our story, Pig in a Wig. As you can see, I wrote various questions on different panels of a beach ball and after the students read the story, they got in a circle and tossed or rolled the ball (lightly of course!) to another group member. Whichever question the student's right hand landed on, they were instructed to answer.

This worked out well until the marker started rubbing off on students' hands... so if you are attempting to use this in your home or classroom do NOT and I repeat do NOT use Vis A Vis markers on a beach ball! :) Let's just say that I will be amending this activity when we use it again! Even though the kids' hands got a little bit messy during this activity, I can honestly say that they were engaged and truly thinking about the story and answering the questions to the best of their ability!

Balloon Rockets

For the past two weeks we have been completing our Air and Weather unit in Science. This was one of the activities we completed in the Science Lab, and it was super fun! The students have been learning that air can move things, and so our lovely AMSTI (Alabama Math, Science, and Technology Initiative) representative who has been helping us recently at DES set this experiment up for us. In case you can't see how this is set up, there are two chairs are placed away from each other, but have a piece of fishing wire strung up between them. SOMEHOW a straw (that has been strung through the fishing wire) is connected to the top of ziploc bag. The ziploc bag has been cut so that one side is completely open. We allowed each student to pump up an oblong balloon without tying a knot, stick half of it in the ziploc bag, and release the balloon to see how far it would travel! Since we had two classes in the lab at once, we had one student from each class race their balloon against each other. (Sorry if that made NO sense, so just watch the video and see what happens!)

By the way... it was about the cutest thing EVER when he said, "I made it!" :) These kids just make my day!