Cute Little Witches

Aren't these little witches cute? My sweet kids had a blast making them! Let me know if you'd like the pattern and I'll post it :)

*** The small black thing that they are holding are cauldrons. Yes, I know they look like purses HAHA! If you make these, it would be better to make the cauldrons bigger! :)

******** Updated!!! I have posted the patterns for these. They can be found here :)

Forest Friends Fry Phrases...TPT

I've just uploaded the forest friends fry phrases flash cards for those of you who have requested them. Click the pic to get them!

I also upload a center activity I'm using this week that deals with sentences and questions. Click the pic to get it!

It's Hocus Pocus Time!

We've started making a few "Halloweeny" things for our classroom this week and the kids are lovin' it! We made witches feet today, along with a writing activity. The kids wrote about what their favorite part of Halloween is. Witches feet are my favorite Halloween symbol and I absolutely love making Dorthy's red slippers during our Wizard of Oz study last spring (I used the wonderful Babbling Abby's Wizard of Oz unit....soooo good!) I also brought out my purple Halloween lights and put them on the cubbies with our witches feet. Take a Look!

*** The pattern for this craft is in my Halloween Unit on TPT. You can get it here I have a poem featured on the craft in the unit, but we decided to use it with a writing activity today.

You can't really see the purple lights, but it looks really cute. :)

What are fry phrases?

I've been posting a lot about using fry phrases in my classroom and I've gotten several emails asking what fry phrases are exactly. 

At a workshop I attended at the beginning on the year, we were given a list of fry phrases. These were created by Dr. Edward Fry and the phrases are made up from his list of sight words. The first 300 phrases make up 67% of all words that children encounter when they read. My class is making their way through the list and I'm starting to see a lot of progress! I hear a lot of my kids using these phrases in their everyday speech and they get so tickled when they realize they just used a fry phrase.

My kids LOVE doing these! We go over them everyday in small groups. I introduce 10 new phrases each week. We add to our collection every week so we've got quite a few now. My kids even ask to go over these in the afternoon after my car riders leave. They usually just sit and color or watch tv for the 20 min until the buses are ready, so I thought this was great that they actually wanted to go into groups and go over fry phrases instead of coloring. I cannot tell you how much they enjoy them. It's their most favorite activity in our small group lesson by far! 

I've created several fry phrases packets. My aliens are uploaded on TPT. These are the first phrases I started with. Click the pic below to get them!

I promised my kids that if they could tell me all of the aliens, then I would make Halloween ones, and they did! They were so excited about these! Click the pic to get them on TPT

I've also created Forest Friends. I've had several requests for these, so I will try and upload them soon

Hope everyone has a great week!

Halloween Nonsense Words...TPT

Why is it, when you put clip art on a word, the kids are so much more excited about it? My kids use to complain at small groups when I pulled out our fry phrases, but when I started putting them on cute clip art, the kids began BEGGING to do them. It was a complete turn around. Here lately, my kids are doing the same thing about nonsense words. They are hating them. So, I thought I would do the same thing with nonsense words that I did with fry phrases. And thus, Halloween Nonsense Word flash cards were created. I just uploaded these to TPT. There's 25 pages with a total of 100 cards. Click the pic to get them! :)

Halloween Math and Literacy Centers...TPT

Halloween Math and Literacy Center Packet uploaded to TPT. This packet includes 53 pages of Halloween fun! This is my first "big" packet and I'm so happy with the way it turned out and I hope you will like it too! Click the pic to get it! 

***First 3 to comment will get it free! Be sure and leave your email address! :)

Meet Frank the Frankenstein!

It's officially Hocus Pocus time. :) We finished up learning about apples yesterday and decided to make our frankensteins so we could go ahead and put them up. Next week is our review week in reading, so I'm planning on using some Halloween books to reteach skills that we learned in unit 1 of Reading Street. Check back for more Halloween activities next week!

Thanks sooo much for everyone who has purchased my Halloween Fry Phrases on Teachers Pay Teachers. I've gotten a couple of emails asking what Fry Phrases are exactly, so I'll post about that later on today.