Planning Ahead to Keep it FUN!

KEEPING IT FUN AND RELEVANT!

Today I want to share a few different ways we practice our words of the week and word families.  I've found that REPETITION truly helps all of my students, and so the more practice they have with words, the easier it is for them to remember - which in turn helps with fluency!

I know we all know that, but sometimes I forget just how important it is for them to see things over and over again.

BASEBALL PPT
We always start off with a Baseball PPT.  It can get kind of loud for this one, but the kids LOVE it!  I start off by "shouting"... "Who's READY FOR SOME... (and then the kids yell) BASEBALL!" Then I tell them to stand up and put their gloves in the air (they just hold up their hands).  The ppt has a pretend baseball field, and when I click on it, the words Hey, Batter, Batter come up, and then I pretend to throw the baseball, while I shout out the word.  As the students "catch" the word, they shout it out again.  Then the next slide appears, and I ask a student how many sounds they hear in the word, and then we check by seeing how many Elkonin boxes are on the board.  Then we go through the word, putting each sound on their sheet as it appears on the ppt.  We've been doing this for 15 years, and it hasn't failed me yet!!  I have a sample at the bottom of this post!

CUT-UP SENTENCES
Another thing we love to do is play Cut Up Sentences.  I have each word on a different card, (just print on colored card stock - making it a different color for every week of words).  I also print a cover for the envelope that the cards go in, (on the cover is all of the sentences that they need to build)  Students get in partners and race the other group to see who can put together all of the sentences first.  THEY LOVE THIS!!!  

FLUENCY SENTENCES
I just started this one last year, but WOW - it was a huge success and truly helped with fluency as well.  I print five sets of the sentences for the week, and when students came to guided reading, that's the first thing we do - try to read all of the sentences within a minute.  I also put these at my other guided reading table for students to practice throughout the week.

WORD FAMILY BOOKLET

The students also love putting together booklets!  These sets have read and color the nonsense words, write the word, find the word, and build the words.  This is just one more way for students to practice the words taught throughout the week.  

PRINT AND GO
We also have several different "handouts" that the students can either do as homework, center work, or an assessment.  Each word family also comes with a short little story and some comprehension questions.  I also have an ABC order page, write the word to match the picture, scrambled words, and substituting letters to make new words.  Again, I know my students rock at fluency because everything we do for the week revolves around the words we are studying for that week.  

Below I have two different sets as FREEBIES.  One deals with word families and the other is our high frequency word work that we do every week throughout the year!  

                         

Hope you enjoy, and THANKS for stopping by!