Turkey Letters and Sounds

One of my favorite holidays happens to be just around the corner!

Thanksgiving of course!

I love gathering with family and eating delicious food!!  
What can be better than that?!

Are you working on introducing and reinforcing letters and sounds?  I created a Turkey Letters and Sounds Pack just for Thanksgiving, with cute little turkeys!  

Don't forget that I also included some cute Thanksgiving pages in the Roll and Say activity to help promote fluency with letters and sounds.

Finally, I have a game board that could be used when reinforcing almost anything.  It is available for FREE!!

Gobble!  Gobble!!

Fluency with Letters and Sounds

Today was a short day at school.  We were dismissed early and will not have school tomorrow due to Sandy.  Being in the northeast, we luckily we have emergency days built into our school year for snowstorms and other emergencies.  Who knew we would use the some of those days for hurricanes two years in a row?  Good news is that it has given me time to let you know what I've been up to!!

I have mentioned in previous posts that my district has adopted and implemented AIMSweb for the first time this year.  Through this assessment, many of my firsties showed weaknesses in both Letter Naming Fluency (LNF) and Letter Sound Fluency (LSF).  For those of you who are not familiar with the assessment, the students are presented with rows of random upper and lower case letters and are asked to name as many letters as they can in one minute for LNF, or as many sounds as they can in one minute for LSF.

LNF and LSF does not tell me what letters and sounds my students know or continue to need more practice with.  To help learn more about this, I also assessed them with my

I found that they did know most of their letters and sounds.  When I put the results of the two assessments together, it showed me that they need extra practice naming their letters and producing their sounds automatically and fluently.  

As a reading teacher, my time with students is limited.  So in addition to providing instruction to my firsties, I also want to provide them with some time for extra fluency practice.  The first few minutes of my intervention time is devoted to practicing this fluency through a quick activity, depending on the day of the week.  
Here is what I have started to do:

Here are some examples of quick activities I do each day:

On Move it Monday, I generally play a quick game where the students are moving game pieces or their bodies.  For example, games like 

and

On Time it Tuesday I have been using my 

I just updated this pack to include a combination of upper and lower case letters.  

For One Breath Wednesday, a wonderful colleague and I created several little ticket-sized boxes with two rows of letters.  My students select their "ticket" and then read each line in one breath. 

Totally unrelated to letters and sounds, I wanted to share with you that we created these tickets after downloading and using Donna Coleman's fabulous "One Breath Boxes" for sight words! 

For Throw it Thursday we will play 

This is a brand new pack that I just uploaded to TPT.  I included two versions for the months of October, November December.

Flip it Friday is usually done with some type of alphabet letter cards.  I have many different sets with different themes, so they are "new" to the kiddos almost each and every time.  I quickly flip through the pile for my students to name the letters or produce the sounds as quickly as they can.

Hopefully these quick daily speed drills will help my firsties increase their automaticity and fluency with their letters and sounds!  What are some activities you do to help promote these skills?

And for those of you who are also affected by Sandy, my thoughts and prayers are with you!  Stay safe!

Fluency and an Easi-Speak Giveaway

Tonight I am going to start the first giveaway of a few giveaways!  I feel very blessed to be offered the chance to review different products on my blog.  But to be completely honest with you, I don't accept unless I can see how it will help benefit my students, my teaching, and you guys!  When Learning Resources contacted me about reviewing this product, I knew it was a tool that fit perfectly into my small group instruction!

Please know that even though Learning Resources has provided me with an Easi-Speak and has asked me to review it, the opinions I list are all mine.

The Easi-Speak is a digital recorder that is held up to your mouth and you speak into, just like a microphone.  Instead of projecting the voice louder, it simply records what the child is saying.  

Here are the points that I love about this product:

-  It is hands on and looks just like a microphone.  My kiddos were so excited when I pulled it out and knew what to do with it right away.  (In fact, when it I took it out of the packing box after receiving it in the mail, my honey at home asked if we were going to be rock stars!)

-  It is easy to use.  The child simply holds it close to their mouth, pushes in and holds down a red button, and speaks into it.  

-  No batteries are required!  You charge it up by inserting it into your computer!

-  It is so very easy to transfer the voice recordings from the device to the computer!

This tool could be used in SOOOOOO many different ways, but here is how I used the Easi-Speak in my instruction:

I have been talking a lot about what fluent reading sounds like with my first and second graders.  I talk about how our reading should not sound robotic and instead sound smooth, just like we are talking, without too many pauses.  Our rate should not be too fast or too slow, but just right. And how our voices change based on the punctuation we see in our reading.

After reading a short text at their reading level into the Easi-Speak, I have them listen to what their reading sounds like.  They rate each aspect of their fluency (rate, accuracy, expression, punctuation) with a fabulous self-reflection tool shared by Rachelle from What the Teacher Wants.  Then we discuss it.  (Thanks Rachelle for sharing!)

Another way I used the Easi-Speak was with my little rock star!  No, we didn't rock out with it (yet), instead she has used it to "read" her books.  She did well holding the button down while turning the pages and keeping the story going!  Here she is reading one of her favorite books, The Very Busy Spider by Eric Carle.  I love watching her eyes light up as she listens to herself reading the story!

Now here is the fun part.  I get to give an Easi-Speak away to one of you (a $69.99 value)!!

Enter below through Rafflecopter:

Emergent Sight Word Phrase Cards

To help my little literacy learners practice their sight words when reading connected text, I created these 
Emergent Sight Word Phrase Cards.


There are 50 different cards to help provide exposure to 45 of the most basic sight words.  The words are repeated in a variety of simple phrases to provide extra practice and reinforcement. 

Click on the shop of your choice:

Enjoy!!

Fluency Practice-Sight Word Phrase Cards

Here is an activity I use with my small groups to help reinforce sight words, fluency, and reading with expression using the first 300 sight words from Fry's Instant Sight Word List (1980).  According to Fry, the first 300 words represent about 67% of all the words students encounter in their reading.  

I broke the phrases up into sets of 100 with 20 phrase cards for each set of 100.  Each phrase/sentence has a punctuation mark at the end to help encourage students to read with the appropriate expression.  I also give suggestions in the download for how to use the cards such as, "Phrases Around the World" and "Guess My Punctuation." 

While instructing, I spend time discussing the importance of punctuation and what happens to our voices when we see a period, question mark, and exclamation point at the end of sentences.  It always surprises me how many students think that when they see an exclamation point at the end of a sentence that it means the character is yelling.  In turn, I always reinforce that exclamation points mean to read with some type of emotion, and when reading within a text they need to think about the context to see what type of emotion it may be.  When using phrase cards, I allow them to use whatever type of emotion they feel comfortable doing.  

(We also play another game where the students select an additional card naming an emotion.  I did not include the emotion cards, but perhaps they will show up as a freebie sometime soon!!)

Thank you!

Enjoy!