Two Literacy Lifesavers!

My class has been using these See it and Say it books daily as a guided reading warm up as well as for targeted intervention with my RTI kiddos!  It’s been something that I have been wanting for years.  I finally decided to go ahead and make all the alphabet sounds and then went into digraphs, chunks, short and long vowels, vowel teams, blends, word endings…  you get the picture!

 This little one is warming up with his blends.  It’s so nice to be able to say remember the slide sound when they are reading a book and get stuck!   They read it like this, “S-L says sl like in slide”

 This book focuses on digraphs because those tricky “H Brothers” are NOT going to get the best of us!  “W-H says wh like in whale”

Next, the most popular word work activities are the sight word and spelling word stick cans.  These cans provide targeted practice with the words I need for that week, quarter of the year, or intervention group.  The cans have different colored labels so I can keep them straight without the students realizing there is any difference! 

Here’s one of my GO TO activities

 House of sticks is one that gets a lot of attention in my room.  Students build the outlined house and then write the words used to build.  If you are focusing on a spelling pattern, they can add more words to the middle of the house that fit the pattern. 

On Friday I finally let on that Christmas may be on it’s way shortly and we wrote Dear Santa Letters {Techy Santa that is!}  Prior to this my class was still doing business as usual, so they kept exclaiming this is SO FUN!  I love this!  

 We wrote our letters to Santa on iPads.

 Then we made Techy Santa come to life!

This moment happened on Friday during reader’s workshop and it was just too precious not to share.  My class keeps a literacy notebook in their book boxes and during one rotation they write.  During a mini writing conference I snapped these pictures to capture this moment forever.  Her story was about the true meaning of Christmas…

 The way this first grader explained what Christmas really means to her made me tear up.  I sat quietly as she read and when she looked up for me to give her those words of wisdom and guidance,  all I could tell her was that she just explained something that most adults could not say in such a beautiful way. 

I am really pushing myself to connect with each student in the way that they need me.  I am sure this amazing budding author made more of an impact on me than I did her, but I just had to share the joy of the Season!  There’s nothing like viewing it from our student’s perspective!