Freaky Frankensteins and more!

Focus Board

This is something new that I tried in my classroom this year and I love it! I found the idea from Mrs. Langston's site:
http://mrslangstonsfirstgrade.shutterfly.com/teacherresources
If you teach Scott Foresman reading street, it has ALL the printables you need for each weekly story. Each morning, I bring my kids back to the rug and we go over the focus board. It really helps them see what we are working on for the week. It also does a great job reinforcing the unit theme and story genre. Just thought I'd share with everyone! :)

Center Activities

Here are some new activities that I am going to use in my reading centers. Most of them deal with nonsense words. A friend shared the idea with me and I spent the weekend making them.

This one is called "Which witch is which? I downloaded clip art of a witch and typed real words and nonsense words on them. The kids have to sort the witches into the correct haunted house. Here is a close up of the witch. I thought they turned out really cute!

The next game is my take on the Sorry! game. There are different boards for different vowel sounds. This one deals with Short A. Two kids can play. The first player picks a card from the stack. Each card has a word written on it. If the word has the short a sound, the player gets to roll the dice and move so many spaces. There are also cards that have Sorry! on them. When a player pulls on of those cards, he or she has to move back spaces (the card says how many). First one to reach the end wins!

The last is Nonsense Tic Tac Toe. I haven't used it yet, but a teacher friend says it works really well in her classroom. The child begins by sorting vowels and constants into two piles. The child then picks one vowel and put it in the middle. Then another child puts two constants on a diffferent square and says the nonsense word.

Pete the Cat

A couple of weeks ago I won the teacher's guide for a picture book called Pete the Cat from April Larremore's Chalktalk blog. This week my class read the book and fell in love with it! They love the song and all day long I heard my kids singing "I love my white shoes". It's definitely a catchy song! Yesterday we decided to recreate the story in a video. The kids had a ball with this! Check it out on my class wiki! The video is on the bottom of the page.

Ms. Leslie Ann's Class Wiki

WOW!!

Teacher Salary Info

Today was an EXTREMELY busy day, so when we came back in from snack, I got a nice little surprise email telling me about this award. This is my first blog award and I'm so excited! :) :)

Story Chatter

I just wanted to share one of my favorite centers that I use in my classroom. I call it 'Story Chatter' and it has worked really well in my classroom this year. It's more of a follow up to my small group reading center that my kids do with me each morning. After I meet with my group for 15 minutes, that group goes to Story Chatter. Here, they talk about the decodable reader that we read in small group. Each week the new comprehension skill is added and they must discuss it. For example, the first week, the group just had to talk about the characters that were in the story since that was the only skill we had discussed. As the weeks go on, they have more to talk about. Right now, each group chats about the characters, setting, if the story was real or fantasy, and the main idea of the story.

I listen to the group as they discuss and I am amazed at how well they do at this center. It really helps them practice the comprehension skill and review what we have just read. It also gives me a chance to walk around the room and make sure the other centers are on task before we switch.