Short Vowel Phonics Practice!

Wow... talk about a blogging hiatus! Ahhh, I haven't blogged since August! I am currently in my fourth year of teaching first grade. I just love those little learners and I LOVE teaching literacy. This year has been a challenging one for me so far. I have a group of students with very diverse needs: academic, social, emotional, behavioral. I love them all to death but these challenges have left me with very little "extra" time to work on my blog and show you what we are doing in the classroom. I love blogging and being a part of this wonderful online community of teachers, but when it comes down to it, my little kiddos come first. Now that we are 2.5 months into the year, my first set of report cards are completed, and I am figuring out what works for each of my little darlings, I am finding myself with a little time on this Sunday to update the ol' blog! Today's topic: SHORT VOWELS!

From the beginning of the year through December, my first grade team focuses on short vowel word families in our classrooms. We spend two weeks on each short vowel sound and the corresponding word families and we complete them in the following order: A, I, O, U, E. Over the past four years, I have created and compiled a variety of interactive materials for teaching short vowels. Some of the activities are things that I have created myself and I have bought some other fabulous resources from other TPT sellers.

Here are some of my favorites!

POETRY AND SONGS

To introduce every short vowel, we sing a silly song or read a short vowel poem at the beginning of the week. I write the poem on a piece of chart paper and we practice it all week. Then, we glue the song/poem into our reading notebooks. Students keep these notebooks in their book bins so that they can re-read these poems and review other phonics skills during Read to Self.

Here is an example of two of the poems that we practice for short vowels: one for short "a" and the other for short "o".

I did not write these poems. They are poems that I compiled from Pinterest. I have them available for free in my TPT store. Click this link to download a set of 17 poems!

WORD SORTS

In our notebooks, we also complete word sorts for each short vowel. After sorting the words, my students practice reading the words "down the columns." This is the simplest way to read the words because they are sorted by word family. After they master reading the words, the students are challenged to read "across the rows." This is tougher because they must switch word families for every word.

Here is an example of our sort for short "i."

These are NOT fancy, by any means, but they do the trick! Download a word sort for each short vowel for free by clicking this link.

My students LOVE word sorts. We also sort word family words during guided reading.

These larger cards are GREAT for small group and whole group practice. We also use these in our pocket chart as a whole group!

It is amazing how simple and versatile these cards have been this year. I use them all the time and they were extremely simple to prep. I've even sent copies of them home with my intervention students to cut out and practice at home.  Grab these word sort cards in my TPT store!


WORD FAMILY TEXTS

One great purchase that I made on TPT is Jessica Tobin's Vowel Books (click the link to be taken to her TPT store). They are fantastic! She has a printable text for each short vowel (and long vowel) and the best part is that they are differentiated! For example, there are three versions of the Short A book - a beginner, a middle level, and more advanced text. This way, all of my students can practice a short vowel book, but it is appropriate for their reading levels! I highly recommend these!

Here is what the Short A texts look like. On the right, you will see the "unfolded" version of the moer advanced text. So simple to prep. Just print and fold!

I also developed some simple word family books! They feature words in a common word family and then use those words in short phrases/sentences so that students get practice with reading the words within text. I use these as a warm up with my lower readers during guided reading during our first week on each vowel. I have them laminated and bound in my classroom library so that students can read them as well.

In addition to the large versions of these word family books, I made smaller versions on rings. These are great for sending with reading volunteers or they can be hung on hooks in the classroom for early finishers. I even send them home as extra practice in my intervention students' reading bags.

EARLY FINISHER/ WORD WORK ACTIVITIES:

Finally, a few of my favorite activities for early finishers! These are super interactive and my students LOVE them! Click the titles to download.

Short Vowel Puzzles:

Word Building Mat for Short Vowels:

Bingo Dauber Activities:

I hope that you enjoyed this peek into short vowel phonics instruction in my classroom!

Interactive Notebooks for Guided Reading

Over the past two weeks, I have started using interactive notebooks as part of my reading group instruction. This is something totally new for me and I have to say... I am LOVING it and so are my students! When students come over to reading group now, they always ask "do we need to bring our notebooks? Are we going to do another page?"

This year, I have six guided reading groups reading texts ranging from a level C up to a level J. Each group has such different needs so I have been doing unique activities with each group.

Today, I am linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching with her fabulous linky, Five for Friday!! Here's a peek at my 5 favorite reading notebook activities!

I'll start with my intervention kiddos! These are the activities that I did with my two lowest reading groups this week. One of the groups is reading at a level C and the other is at a level E. I have a lot of kids that are in need of reading intervention this year and these notebook pages are perfect for them! 

 In this first interactive page, students wrote CVC words that matched a picture. Then, they cut out the pictures/words and glued them under a heading depending on the vowel sound.

The finished product:

We are learning about blends and digraphs in our literacy instruction and this group drew lines to connect pictures to their beginning blends. Simple and effective!! One of the things that I love about these notebooks is that students keep them in their book bins for Daily 5 and they often look back at their work. Great way to revisit their previous learning!!

This last interactive phonics page was completed only by my lowest reading group, my level C students. They connected CVC words to their pictures.They did a really great job with this too!

All of these pages can be found in The Sassy School Teacher's fabulous product, First Grade Phonics for Interactive Notebooks. These are super cute and a huge time saver for me. Great, interactive practice for my intervention students! Click the link to check it out in her TpT store!!

Okay, moving on with some of my other reading groups! My next level reading group is my level F group. This week, we read a text called My New Pet. After our typical reading group of strategy discussion, reading, and fluency work, we practiced responding to the text through writing. Students had to think of three ways to care for a pet that were mentioned in the text. We had a great discussion about the differences between "ways we already know how to take care of a pet" vs "ways that were mentioned in the text." 

Now, for these interactive pages, I am not using an existing product. What I have been doing the past two weeks is just quickly creating headings, questions, sorting activities in Google Drive at school in the mornings. Since the prompts and activities are so specific to the text that we are reading, I'm not planning on making a TpT product with these "text-specific" resources. However, later in this post, you will see an interactive page that features a common core aligned language activity. I may consider compiling some of those pages in a product for TpT at some point!

Here's a look at my simple headings/questions that I put together in Google... three to a page and printed to our color printer... simple!! Especially when I'm running around like a crazy person in the morning before school... please tell me I'm not the only one!

In Google Drive, I started a folder to house all of my interactive printables, organized by guided reading level so that I can easily print these out next year or when other guided reading groups reach that level text.

Okay, moving up in the guided reading continuum... this is the activity that my level H group completed. We are working on nonfiction texts and text features. This week. students read a nonfiction text about sea turtles. We practiced writing facts and focused on using the text to support our writing (checking factual information, spelling help, etc) but then putting our ideas into our own words. 

This group LOVED this activity! I guided them in writing two facts and then they wanted to write more on their own later in the week! This little darling filled a whole page in her notebook!

Finally, my level J group is working on summarizing and sequencing. We read a longer fiction text over the course of a few days and students wrote about the beginning, middle, and end of the story.

This group also went the extra mile and filled more than one page in their descriptions of the story!

The last type of interactive notebook page that we completed was a Common Core Language based activity. This activity was completed by all of my students. We are learning about nouns. This week, we have been discussing the different meanings of "s" on the end of a noun (plural nouns and possessive nouns). We began this activity by finding all of the nouns in our sentences with an "s" at the end and highlighting them. Then we cut and pasted the sentences under the headings based on if they were plural or if they were possessive.

This was another one of those pages that I quickly put together before school one day. Here's a link to my Google Doc if you'd like to print and use this in your classroom! It's not fancy, but it was very effective with my students!

I hope that you enjoyed a look at a topic that is quickly becoming near and dear to my heart. These reading notebooks are a big motivator in my students' learning! 

Short Vowel Fun in First Grade!

Wow... it has been waaaay to long since I have found time to update my blog! I have missed it! This cold, windy day has kept me indoors and it's time to get back to blogging!

I am loving my new class of darling first graders. They are sweet and adorable and they make me laugh everyday. However, I am finding that many of my students have more significant needs for reading intervention this year. We are hitting the short vowels hard to help them build up their word family recognition/ chunking! So far, we have intensively studied short a  and we are currently working on short i.

Here are a few of the activities we have been doing!

FLUENCY READERS:

One thing that I have found about several of my kiddos is that they can read word family words in isolation. However, when they encounter those same words in a simple text, they do not recognize the word families or apply their knowledge of phonics in decoding. I created these little readers to focus on different word families and give students the opportunity to practice reading the word family words in a sentence.

Each Word Family Reader features words in the same word family. I have created sets for Short I, Short O, and Short U so far, but I plan to make them for Short A and Short E as well! I have been using these as an intro to my guided reading groups. I also have my intervention kiddos keep some of these in their book bin to practice reading word family words!

Grab a FREEBIE of my "OG" Word Family Fluency Reader!

Click the links to view each set!

Word Family Fluency Readers: Short I

Word Family Fluency Readers: Short O

Word Family Fluency Readers: Short U

FLUENCY FLASH CARDS!

Similar to the fluency readers, these flash cards give students the opportunity to sort words by word family and read each of the words in the context of a sentence. My kids love these!!

Grab the full set of Short Vowel Word Family Fluency Phrases in my TPT store!

FLIP BOOKS:

These short vowel flip books from Nicole Rios are fabulous! The kids love the interactive format. They are sorting words, making words, practicing handwriting, and much more!

The Short A Flip Book is FREE in her TPT store! She has a flip book for each short vowel!!

A Day of Motivation!



For the last two weeks, I have been wanting to re-create my letter headings for my word wall and I finally got up the motivation today. Consonants in green and vowels in purple! Found a great idea on Pinterest to hang ribbon down from each letter to staple the words to. Can't wait to get it up in my room! Here's a freebie copy of my letters if you would like to make your own! (the blank circle is what I used to trace on cardstock for my borders)

 

 



I also made it to Big Lots and the Learning Shop today! Love both of those places! Got some new borders and some guided reading texts (on clearance!). I have been accumulating multiple copies of books for the past two years to use as guided reading books and they have been sitting in random piles, shoved on bookshelves and carts, etc. I am excited to finally have some big baskets to organize them in on my counter. Take a peek at my baskets from Big Lots and pick up my labels here if you are interested!!



Now that I've done a little organizing today, I'M HOOKED.... going to do some paper organization tonight! Need to put together a "teacher binder" for the next year!

PLEASE COMMENT with things that you CAN'T LIVE WITHOUT in your teacher binder! I'm always looking for new organization ideas!!

Five for Friday: IT'S SPRING BREAK!

This week is a much anticipated Five for Friday because this Friday begins my SPRING BREAK! Doing my happy dance! In celebration of spring break, everything in my TPT store is 10% off through Sunday! Enjoy!

Linking up with Doodlebugs... although I'm getting in the bad habit of posting my Five for Fridays on Thursday nights! Oh well, I will link up tomorrow morning!

 

COMPREHENSION FREEBIE!

 

 

 

As always, we have been working on comprehension. This week, my kiddos practiced asking and answering questions while doing Read to Someone. After reading a story, they rolled their comprehension dice and discussed the story. Grab your own FREE template for the dice here! Print on cardstock and tape together! Simple! Enjoy!

 

 

ADVENTURE TO FITNESS

 

 

With this crazy winter and indoor recess, my students need to let out some energy sometimes! Adventure to Fitness is a great idea for indoor recess or movement breaks! Kids go on an adventure in different parts of the world, solving mysteries, and they are moving/exercising in place the whole time... and they LOVE it!! Adventure to Fitness currently has all of their videos for free... I recently got an email saying that they are changing their membership and will be charging for many of the videos, but there will always be 5 free ones! Check it out at adventuretofitness.com!

 

 

READING STRATEGY:

CHUNK LETTERS AND SOUNDS TOGETHER!

 

 

 

 

Recently, I noticed that many of my students were struggling with this reading strategy. They were sounding out every single letter in words instead of looking for chunks or smaller words inside of bigger words. I created these "Chunk it up" cards and laminated them. To warm up for guided reading, students pick a word and find as many chunks, digraphs, blends, familiar vowel patterns, etc that they can. They circle them in dry erase marker and write the parts that they find underneath. They love it and I have noticed an improvement in their decoding in guided reading! Success! Check them out in my TPT store!! - CHUNK IT UP: BE A SOUND DETECTIVE -

 

 

 

MATH WORKSHOP UPDATE!

QUICK FACT FLUENCY!

 

 

 

I have been loving my math workshop structure the last few weeks! One thing that I found was that I needed an easy activity for kids to do while they were waiting for me to get started during their "teacher time" group. Perfect opportunity for some math fact practice!! I created 9 different fact fluency sets for math facts including plus one, plus two, plus three, minus one, minus two, minus three, doubles, making 10, and making 20 facts. When students go to the table for teacher time, they grab a set of fact fluency cards and practice while they wait for me to get the rest of the class settled. I found this old organizer... perfect for my fact fluency organization! Check them out on my TPT store! - FACT FLUENCY CARDS - (the pack also includes a set of numbers for sequencing activities)

 

 

 

MY SPRING BREAK PROJECT:

FLUENCY FOLDERS!!

 

 

I recently downloaded Cara Carroll's Rock Your Fluency packs from TPT... they are fabulous! Over break, I am planning to put together some AWESOME fluency folders with the materials in her packs. I'll post more once I am farther along... Here's a look at the lovely lamination that I have to cut out to get started... Now I need a trip to TARGET to pick up some fun colored folders!

 

 

So close to spring break! Looking forward to a relaxing week!