What Does the Fox Say? Phoneme Blending Fun

At the beginning of the year, primary teachers feel very frustrated get lots of laughs when we work with students on blending sounds together to say a word. When we say the sounds /f/ /r/ /o/ /g/ students are supposed to hear and blend those sounds together and say frog...not MONKEY! Ha! I wrote about that here. :)

Students LOVE the song What Does the Fox Say? and I love having fun visitors come visit our room to help add a little engagement to our lessons. So, we had a visit from Mr. Fox. He brought us a package with several games to help us be successful at blending sounds together to read. Mr. Fox wrote us a letter explaining what he wanted us to learn.

Our first job was to practice just hearing sounds and blending them together. We practiced this skill playing Fox Talk Bingo. Students were given a game board and had to listen as I said the sounds in my mystery word. Students blended the sounds they heard together and covered the matching picture.

Our next activity was to practice blending the sounds in the sound boxes together. With these cards students pointed and said the sounds in each box and then used the arrow to help them quickly blend the sounds together to read the word. For kiddos that needed a little bit more support, I added the dots to some of the cards. After they read the word, they find the matching picture. :)

You can see Mr. Fox helping us. :)

Mr. Fox is also fast and wanted us to practice blending sounds together quickly. Students use a toy car to drive under the sounds. The students then drive the car faster as they blend the sounds together to say the word.

Another way we practiced blending sounds together was using these cards as transitions or time fillers. There are a variety of cards ranging from words with 3 phonemes up to words with 6 phonemes. Just say the sounds on the cards and the kiddos will tell you what the word is. :)

To see how well the kiddos have developed this skill, Mr. Fox made 2 different ways this skill can be assessed.

Click above for a *freebie*.

And of course we have to dance to the song at the end of these activities..several times! 

Tons of fun learning What Does the Fox Say? You can grab it from my store here.

From My Heart to Yours,

Heather

The Great Paw Print Hunt with Pete the Cat

Hi Sweet Friends. Since I never blogged about this last year, I knew I wanted to share it with y'all now. If you have ever read my blog, you know that we LOVE to have special visitors come to our classroom.

These special visitors are usually an animal like Stretchy Snake or something seasonal like The Pumpkin Snatchers and Lucky the Leprechaun...and those are just a few of the visitors that have stopped by our room. There are tons more.

These special visitors are a great way to engage the kiddos and get them excited about the lesson. The visitors usually have us "hunting" and looking for things around the school. I usually just put the things we are hunting for down the hall/path we will take to go to Music/PE. This way we can quickly gather them without spending class and learning time hunting for them. Plus, this helps the kiddos be quiet in the line because I'll call on quiet friends to hold the things we find. :)

These lessons usually start with a letter.

After receiving this letter, we start hunting for paw prints. Before starting the hunt, we talk about and make predictions about who the paw prints might belong to. You always hear some interesting predictions. :)

When we are hunting for things in the hall, the kiddos know to stop the line and quietly point to what we are hunting for. There is LOTS of very enthusiastic pointing!

I always set the hunt up before school and then pretend when the kiddos see the things in the morning that I have no idea how they got there. :)

When the kiddos see the paw prints, most still don't make the connection that these are Pete the Cats paw prints...and I don't tell them. :)

Beside each paw print is a clue. The clues tell the students about a favorite treat of the author of the letter. Remember, the letter is signed as a Groovy Friend. 

When we finish finding all 6 clues, we head back to the room. When we get back to the room (This will usually be AFTER PE/Music), there is a package and a cat food bowl full of letters on my table.

We talk about all 6 clues and read the letter on the bag that tells us we need to use our schema and infer what could be inside the bag. We practice using sentence stems to help us talk about our inference.

We open the package to check our inference. We find strawberries and our paw print letter hunt cards.

Along with the strawberries and word study activity, the Groovy Friend also left us one of his books.

The reason there were paw prints around the school was he lost his shoes because they were covered in strawberries! :)

My kiddos seriously loved this activity. I was able to use the cards in Word Work and in my reading/RtI groups. If you are interested in grabbing it, click on the link below.

Click on the picture to grab a *freebie*!

Have a groovy day!

From My Heart to Yours,

March *Freebie* Fun...and Sound Racers =)

I love Spring. Here in East Texas we are already seeing the signs of Spring:  tulips trees, dogwoods, azaleas, and many other flowers are all starting to bloom. March also brings Spring Break, my birthday and my niece's birthday. But, I also start freaking out a bit....

3 months of school left???!!!???!!! Holy Moly...I need to see how much more I can cram into my kiddos heads. There are times I am feeling good about all of the progress my kiddos are making then....BAM!!! They say or do something that makes me want to go bang my head against the wall. Seriously, where have you been the last 7 months ????!!!!!????

One of my kiddos last week could not remember what this sign meant -....and this happened right after she just successfully finished a math sort that was mixed addition and subtraction. I had a 5 minute conversation with her that made me think I needed either an adult beverage or medicine for the migraine headache that was coming on. I felt exactly like this...

At times like this, all I can say is Help Me Jesus.

With Easter being in March this year, we will be doing a few of our leprechaun and St. Patrick's Day activities this week. Here are some of the *freebies* I shared last year.

Click on the picture above to grab your *freebies*.

My kiddos LOVE dice games. =)

Here is a subtraction sort....

And some ABC order fun.

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I finished this packet several weeks ago and just never got around to sharing with you about it. My kiddos love this and I am able to use it with all of my Guided Reading groups. The packet has around 300 words that focus on:

*short vowels and CVC words
*blends
*digraphs
*CVCC and CCVC words
*magic e
*r controlled vowels
*the 2 sounds of ow
*ou words like in mouse
*oo words like in boot
*vowel teams like ai, ee, oa, ay, etc

This is wonderful for RtI and is amazing at helping children blend sounds together to help decode words. The kiddos LOVE using little cars to drive over the sounds and then race and blend the sounds faster to read the word.

It is on sale this weekend. Click here to go check it out. =)

I hope you enjoy the *freebies*. I would love for you to leave me a heart note if you grab them. 

From My to Yours,

Stretchy Snake Fun

When we came back from lunch one day, we had a package waiting at the door.

The package was from Stretchy Snake.

This is Stretchy Snake.

Here is the letter he left us.

You can grab your letter from Stretchy Snake here.

There are 2 different letters: one talks about Eagle Eyes and the other one does not talk about Eagle Eyes in case your class doesn't know who he is.

In the letter, he told us he was a friend on Eagle Eyes and he was going to teach us another way to decode words. He even sent us some goodies to help us be super duper Word Detectives!

This last minute teacher Stretchy Snake forgot to put a few items in the package.

One of our favorite goodies are the Stretchy Snake Boxes.

Inside the boxes are cards. As you slowly slide the box out, you say the sounds...be sure to teach the kiddos to not slide it out all of the way. You slide the box back in and then slide it out faster while blending the sounds together. When you think you know the word, you slide the box out all of the way and check your answer with the picture. I'll try and find the labels for the boxes and post them later. =)

This is an activity both the kiddos and I ADORE.

The next thing we made were our class sound boxes. We made this with the tape Stretchy Snake put in the package. Our sound boxes help us s-t-r-e-t-ch out words...and the kiddos LOVE to HOP IT OUT!!! Can we say fun for our little ADHD energetic kiddos!!!! 

Here is how you use the sound boxes. A kiddo starts by standing to the left side OUT of the first box. If the word is bus, he hops into the first box and says /b/. He then hops into the 2nd box and says /u/. He hops into the 3rd box and says /s/. Finally, he hops OUT of the box and says the word bus. I hope that makes sense. =)

We can use the sound boxes for this fun activity. =)

Grab your copy here. Kiddos hop out the word and record the answer.

We also meet Stretchy Snake's friend Stretchy Giraffe.

He also helps us stretch out words.

Stretchy Snake also left us some slinkies and some words to stretch out and read.

I hope you and your kiddos enjoy these activities. =)

If you grab the *freebies*, please take a few minutes to leave me a heart note. =)

Question of the Day:  How do you handle tattling in your classroom?

From My Heart to Yours,

Sound Box Hop and Stretchy Snake

Today we met Stretchy Snake. Stretchy Snake is one of the Beanie Baby Decoding Strategies. He helps us to s-t-r-e-t-ch out our sounds and then blend them back together. We have been working on sound boxes during Word Study time and today we made our sound boxes for the learning rug. For some reason, they LOVE watching you do this. We then practice stretching out cvc words as we hop into the sound boxes. This is great for your kinesthetic learners (plus those kiddos who can never sit still like to use ALL of the energy God gives them (hahaha). This is hard for some kiddos who want to put all the sounds in one box but they soon realize they have to hop one sound for each box. They then hop "out" of the boxes and say the word. Later, after lots and lots of practice, this activity will be one they can choose from during Word Study centers. They even come and use the sound boxes during Writing Workshop. Later on in the year, we will add another box when we do words with blends. When you do sounds like sh or ck, those are 2 letters working together to make one sound so you only hop into one box for that sound.

Meet Stretchy Snake

Our Sound Boxes

Sound Box Hop

I hope your kiddos are happy to hop! I love heart notes because they encourage me to share more so please one! I would LOVE for you to follow me too!