Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Rainbow Rhymes & Reading Games


Rainbows
Who doesn't love rainbows? Kids get excited about them. They help us organize things by color. I've gotten off tangent on turning some of our recent games into units by....rainbows.
 
This is the Weather Roll, Read & Keep, I made for our unit in kindergarten and the pocket die. Originally, I was putting this in my literacy workstations with sight word cards. But we need to work on cvc words and end sounds, so I pulled out some older cards with 3-4 letter words. Each reading group played the game but with different words and I did a little assessing. I decided to make some cards (a little smaller than these with cvc words). My groups love using the pocket die.
 
 I picked up the All Occasion Frames by Teaching in the Tongass during the recent sale. I love them. They are easy to size and work with.

The 2 rainbow patterns were my favorite. I started making word and picture cards. Of course, my brain has to think of all the ways you can use something  so I made sure the words I picked had rhymes. Then I made an entire set with missing end sounds. I asked my family tons of opinion questions. We decided on the white centers so you can trace the words. Here is my daughter's message after trying out sizes for me.
 



I am super excited by the activities in here. You can use them with any unit. I even made multiple student direction pages.


 There are ton more things you could do with the cards like assign partners by matching rhymes. There is a freebie in the preview.

Do you follow Coast to Coast Kinder?

They are having a weekly linky party on Wednesdays. This week the topic is ELA ideas. I am linking this post up with them.
I want to talk about blending. Especially this time of the year, we love teaching word families like -at and -og. It is all about chunking and rhyming and they are great.

Do you have children who struggle to recode those decodable words? for whom p--it blends into pat or sit? Have you tried making one hand onset and the other rime and slowly repeating and moving the hands closer together until their mouths are forced to say the word (like a fabulous 2 headed monster we grew up with)?

Then try this approach - chunk the beginning. Instead of m-ap, blend ma-p. It gets most of the word into their little mouths. We recently used two-sided counters with a small group. We wrote the ma- on one chip and the -p on the other. We slowly moved them together as the group said the sounds. For another child, we found that if we repeated that beginning chunk quickly in call-respond style and then threw in the end sound, he combined them. It forced him to blend automatically instead of thinking about the word.

Every learner is different and sometimes it is the simple changes that make everything click for them. : )
Have a great week and check out the links at Coast to Coast.
Jenn
 

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