File Folder Activities for Sight Words

admin January 10, 2015 No Comments

I am super excited to have completed the File Folder Activities for Sight Words!  I’ve had so much positive feedback from teachers and parents who have been using the File Folder Phonics- Alphabet bundle that I’ve been working like mad to complete the sight word companion.  This bundle contains 4 interactive activities for teaching and practicing sight words.  The first activity is building the word with Play Doh.  The kiddos absolutely love working with dough! The second activity is building the word with either magnetic letters or letter tiles.  You have a choice to make with this.  You can either use magnetic letters-  that’s fine- they work great. You could also opt for using letter tiles.  The great thing about

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The Ultimate Teacher’s Guide to Letter and Number Reversals

admin January 4, 2015 No Comments

I am so happy to have Anne-Marie Morey from the BayTreeBlog.com as a guest blogger!  I absolutely LOVE Anne-Marie’s blog and she’s my go-to gal for issues relating to dyslexia.  After reading her post, be sure to visit her blog and download her FREE Workbook for Letter Reversals!!  The link is included below!    The Ultimate Teacher’s Guide to Letter and Number Reversals Have you ever worked with a student who reverses her letters?  Maybe you’ve seen something like this before? Chances are good then that you’re as frustrated over reversed b/ds and p/qs as your students are.  My students get so discouraged when they’ve finally cracked the reading code, but they still struggle with letter reversals. Unfortunately, there is

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Winter Themed Sight Word Freebie

admin December 29, 2014 No Comments

I just love winter.  Really, I do.  Living in northern Michigan certainly has its benefits and having four very different seasons is only one of many.  The kiddos certainly love it when we can vary our activities by adding a holiday or seasonal twist, and in celebration of winter, I’ve created several winter-themed activities for centers and small groups.  Here’s one of my favorite games.  Just click the link below to download this FREEBIE!  To download this freebie just click the following link: Winter Themed 4 In A Row Game Board The Four-In-A-Row game is super fun and easy to play.  All you need are bingo chips (about 10 of 2 colors) and the printed game board.  This game is played with

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Phonics Activities on the Go!

admin December 26, 2014 No Comments

It all started with a box.  Literally– really– it all started with a box.  While walking through Michael’s Craft Store one day I came across this plastic bead tote and thought what a great container for activities.  I have several teacher friends who serve as Title One support for classrooms and they are always on the go.  When moving from classroom to classroom having materials organized is certainly a must.  Even if you’re not moving between classrooms, having your materials organized is so important as you could lose precious minutes during intervention just trying to find your materials. This box can certainly help with organizing picture cards. I decided to create two sets- a phonemic awareness box and a phonic

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Long Vowel Spelling Patterns

admin December 17, 2014 No Comments

Many of my first and second friends are now working with long vowel sounds.  Those vowels can be so tricky as sometimes the vowel says a short sound and sometimes a long sound, and then to top it off, there are several different spelling patterns for long vowels.  When our young readers are learning these patterns, reference posters often help.  I created this poster just for this purpose.  You can download this freebie by just clicking the link below.  To download this poster just click the following link: Long Vowel Sounds Poster I created the Long Vowel Sounds Spelling Patterns activity for my first and second grade friends to practice the long vowel sounds spelling patterns.  Each booklet contains 16 practice

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4 Ways to Improve Oral Reading Fluency

admin December 9, 2014 No Comments

Picked up a good book lately?  Well, my shelves are literally busting with school-related books and I just organized them into categories.  During my organizational frenzy, I came across Tim Rasinki’s book The Fluent Reader.  I read this book cover to cover over spring break one year and absolutely loved it!  I reopened the book once again, shook out some sand and read a few chapters.  Here’s a little snippet from the book. According to Rasinski, “reading fluency refers to the ability of readers to read quickly, effortlessly, and efficiently with good, meaningful expression.”  Fluent readers are able to recognize many words by sight and, when coming upon an unknown word, able to decode the word quickly.  Because good readers

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Word Family Penguins- Fun Winter Themed Activity for Teaching Word Families

admin December 4, 2014 No Comments

Last year Kyle (fabulous artist) created these adorable penguins.  I absolutely fell in love with them.  I created a few activities for my kindergarten friends at that time using the penguins, but not so much for my first grade friends.  Well, many of my first grade kiddos are now working with word families and what a wonderful time of year to use these friendly little guys to create an activity.  When you download this file you will receive 21 word family ice cubes with over 200 corresponding penguins with the words.  This activity is ideal for either small group instruction or as an activity for your independent literacy centers.   21 word families and 200 penguins!  That’s quite a bit-

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Free Phonics Cue Card

admin November 16, 2014 No Comments

I’m so lucky to be working with kind and dedicated educators!  When my two school friends, Kim and Robin, asked me to create a cue card for them to use with their students, well of course, I was happy to do it.  They had cue cards for the letters and sounds and just needed something a little more advanced that would address long vowel sounds, digraphs and diphthongs.  The cue card is intended to be placed on student’s desks for reference during reading and writing activities. Now when I showed another school friend the cue card she asked that I substitute the digraph pictures with the cues that we use when we are teaching digraphs.    If you’d like to

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Free Digraph Posters

admin November 6, 2014 No Comments

Have you ever had a project that you’ve been meaning to get to, but for some reason it just lingers on in your to-do list?  That’s kind of how it was with these consonant digraphs posters.  They’ve just been sitting on desktop for literally over a year.   Well, my friend was helping me with a computer project and he literally gasped when he saw the mess of files on my desktop.  That was motivation enough to get to work on a few of those projects. If you’d like to download these posters, just click HERE.  They are available for a free download in my Teachers Pay Teachers store.

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Teaching the Hard and Soft “C” and “G”

admin October 30, 2014 No Comments

Our little first graders will soon be introduced to the two sounds of  “c” and “g”.  Those two consonants are a bit tricky as they make different sounds depending upon the letter that follows in the word.  We typically teach students that the “hard” sounds of “c” and “g” occur most often, but they do need to know when these letters make the “soft” sound.  We tell the students that when the letter “c” is followed by the letters i, e or y, the “c” makes the /s/ sound just like in the words “city”, “cent” and “icy”. The letter “g” is similar.  When the “g” is followed by an i, e or y it makes the /j/ sound as

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