Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Get your SHOP on!!!!!

Are you ready to get your shop on?  I don't know about you guys, but my wishlist is OVERFLOWING with great products!  My store, along with many others, will be 20% off Monday and Tuesday.  Well, get your cart ready and don't forget to use the code: CYBER.

Here are a few of my holiday and winter products you might want to check out:

Gingerbread Men



Christmas


 Winter





Or - If you'd like all the winter units bundled together:

Freebies:



Happy Shopping!

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Today's my Birthday!

Happy Birthday to me!
Clip Art - courtesy of Creative Clips

How about a quick giveaway!
Leave me a comment with your email address and I will choose a winner tomorrow morning.
Winner can choose any item from my TpT store!

The winner is #3 - Melissa!  Check your email Melissa!

Friday, November 15, 2013

Long Vowel Practice

I'm so excited - we finally made it to long vowels!  If you teach first grade then you know what I mean!  We open up a whole new world when we introduce long vowels.  There are hundreds of new words that my firsties can add to their repertoire!  They have been loving it too!

My first grade team felt like we needed a little more to go along with our long vowel stories from our reading series.  We have always added "extras" before but we just felt like we needed something different.  I created this unit for us to use this year.  I really do feel that this can be a great supplement to any reading series.

This unit is actually very flexible!  You can use it with your whole class or with small groups.  Here is how we've been using it in our classroom:

We spent 2 weeks on long a which was great, because it allowed me to use everything whole group to introduce before putting all of it in centers.  I loved using the onset/rime cards above every morning for a quick fluency practice.  I would reach in and grab and onset stick and then the class would read the real/nonsense words as quickly as they could.  They loved that half of the words didn't make sense!  We would practice with about 5 different onsets each morning.  It would only take about 2-3 minutes but it was great reading practice!


I used the above worksheets in my guided reading groups.  My firsties seemed to really enjoy all the different activities.



We will work on long i next week and I'm excited that my kiddos already know how to do each activity.  I'm keeping all of their fluency stories together in a folder.  I plan on taking a day or two every few weeks to just go back and practice reading past stories.  I love that can go back and feel successful when reading familiar passages.

I would love for you to check it out!  Just click on any of the above images and it will take you over to TpT so you can see it a little more in-depth.

What are your favorite "long vowel" activities?  I would love to hear your ideas!

Have a WONDERFUL weekend!

Tuesday, November 5, 2013

The Phonics Dance

Our first grade team has been using "The Phonics Dance" for a couple of years now.  We were so excited when we were able to have Ginny Dowd come to our school last Monday for a professional development day.  She has so many great ideas!  She is so full of energy and we really learned a lot from her.  Our first grade team was also able to go to her "Beyond The Phonics Dance" conference last Saturday.  She had a ton of great ideas on Vocabulary and Comprehension.  Here is a picture of Ginny and I.  She had her magic wand and sprinkles on hand for the pic!


I just recently posted my First Grade "I Can" Statements.  Click on the pic below to check them out!


Have a great rest of the week!

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