Little Literacy Learners

Vocabulary Spelling City Winner

Thank you to all of those who entered!

The winner of the Premium Membership to Vocabulary Spelling City is
Jennifer A!

Check your email Jennifer!!

Following Steps and Directions

Is your school preparing for state exams? In New York State students in grade 3 and above will take their English Language Arts exams next month. Although I am not working with anyone in the testing grades this year, I wanted to share with you an activity I did last year with my 3rd and 4th graders that stepped away from paper and pencil and/or filling in bubbles on an answer sheet.

The students I worked with last year had difficulty answering questions related to passages that required them to follow directions. They had trouble with questions that asked things such as, "In which step..." or "What happens right after/before..."

So to help practice this, I created this little game-like activity for them to read a short passage that included steps or directions. They then had to select a card that listed a multiple choice question, worded in a way that they may see it on the state test. There are four different passages, with 8 question cards to go along with each. They are fun little passages, with simple topics:

"Making a Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich"

"How to Jump Rope"

"Brushing Your Teeth"

"How to Send a Letter in the Mail"

(Click on the picture below!)

They really enjoyed this activity! It provided them with practice reading passages and answering multiple choice questions without sitting and filling in bubbles, while exposing them to the vocabulary they may encounter on the actual test.

What are some fun ways you help your students prepare for tests?

St. Patty's Phoneme Segmentation

Top of the morning to you!

My kinderkids have been working really hard to isolate the sounds they hear at the beginning and end of words. We will be moving on to isolate sounds they hear in the middle of words. We will be doing a lot of work with CVC words and Elkonin boxes in the next few weeks, so I wanted to share this little St. Patty's Day phoneme segmentation activity
with you:

This activity addresses the following Common Core Learning Standards: RF.K.2d: Isolate and pronounce the initial, medial vowel, and final sounds (phonemes) in three-phoneme (CVC) words.

They will use this by placing all of their gold coins on the top of the rainbow. They will then select a card (I have sooo many picture cards to choose from, so I did not include any in the document), name what is pictured, and then slide their gold coin down the rainbow for each sound they hear. I will be using real gold coins. (Well not real gold, just plastic, but it is real to them!) I did include paper gold coins in case you didn't have the "real" ones on hand.

I would love for you to share with me some ways that you reinforce phoneme isolation and/or phoneme segmentation?

Vocabulary Spelling City

I was contacted by Vocabulary Spelling City to see if I would would like to try their Premium membership, write an honest review, and in exchange I would be able to share a FREE premium membership with one of you! Anyone interested?

Let's back up a little bit...how many of you know about Vocabulary Spelling City? On this site, parents and teachers can enter and save personalized spelling lists, and these lists can be accessed from any computer at any time. What I didn't realize, is that it offers MUCH more than just reinforcement with spelling and provides so many different learning activities and games. It allows for customized spelling tests, vocabulary tests, flash cards, games, handwriting, sentence and paragraph writing, and even more!

I was happy to see that a large portion of their website is FREE. The FREE portion of the site allows you to access a Basic membership. BUT Spelling City also offers a Premium membership. The differences are outlined below:

I am thrilled to provide you the opportunity to win a Premium membership!

Before playing around on the site, I really wasn't sure what the site would have to offer for my emergent Kinderkids, but I think they would really enjoy the Missing Letter and Letter Fall games. I am excited because this will be a great site to refer parents to! And for those students who do not have access to a computer at home, most of the games are printable!!

What can you do to win the premium membership? Simply head on over to their fabulous site and look around. Come back here and leave a comment indicating what you would like best about Vocabulary Spelling City. Then sign into the Rafflecopter and indicate that you did it! This ends on March 11, 2012.

Birthday Winner!

Today is my blog's 1 year birthday and it is time to see who won my birthday giveaway!

Thank you all for the wonderful comments!
We all enjoyed your kind words!

The 3 winners randomly chosen are:
Kate

Jen

Miss Nguyen

Ladies, please keep your eye out for an email (or two) from me, as I plan to send it out sometime this evening!

I can't believe that it was one year ago today that I created my first post! I have heard from many of you who have been comfortably stalking blogs, wondering if perhaps you should start your own. I say YES! Jump right in! The educational blogging community is so welcoming!

I have to add that when I went to match the first number to the number chosen by the Random Number Generator I realized that my comments were not numbered! Aaaahhhh!! Thank goodness for Kristen over at Ladybug's Teacher Files and her amazingly easy tutorial for numbering comments! Thank you Kristen!! My blog certainly wouldn't be the same if I didn't have your tutorials available!

Luck Letter Literacy Pack and MY BIRTHDAY!!

I recently posted a Lucky Letter Literacy Pack in my shops, just in time for St. Patrick's Day. It is a fun little pack that includes 6 different early literacy activities that I have featured previously.

Here is what is included:

~ Lucky Letter Finds and Lucky Letter Mix-Ups (upper and lower): These can be used to practice letter matching, letter identification, and letter sound correspondences.

~ Lucky Letters ABC Path (upper and lower): Students get to practice reciting the alphabet and alphabetical order as they color a path from clover to clover, going from A-Z.

~ Write the Missing Lucky Letters (upper and lower): Students get to practice alphabetical order and their writing skills as they write the missing lucky letters on the clovers or write all of the lucky letters on clovers.

~ Circle the Beginning/Ending Sounds: Students look at the pictures and circle the lucky letter sound heard at the beginning or end of the word. They choose the correct sound out of four sounds, all of which are in the word.

These activities address the following Common Core Learning Standards:

~ RF.K.1d: Recognize and name all upper and lowercase letters of the alphabet.

~ RF.K.2d: Isolate and pronounce the initial, medial vowel, and final sounds (phonemes) in three phoneme (CVC) words.

~ RF.K.3a: Demonstrate basic knowledge of one-to-one letter-sound correspondences by producing the primary or many of the most frequent sound for each consonant.
~ L.K.1a: Print many upper- and lowercase letters.

You can find this pack in both of my shops:

Teachers Notebook

Teachers Pay Teachers

Don't forget that I am having a little giveaway with some of my TBA friends to celebrate my 1st birthday for my blog!!

Entering the giveaway is super easy.

Click here to find out more and to enter!

For those of you who have entered, THANK YOU so much! We have all really enjoyed reading the comments you have written!

Speaking of giveaways, did you know that TBA has their own page devoted to giveaways by amazing authors? Check the page and current giveaways by clicking here.

Happy Birthday To...CLOSED

Guess who will be celebrating a birthday on March 7th?

Little, ole' ME!

And guess how old I will be?
1!
I will be 1!

March 7th marks the 1 year birthday for my blog!

Seems like it was just yesterday that I was sitting here stalking blogs and debating whether or not to start one of my own. I was so afraid that no one would want to read anything I had to share. I have learned so much and have met so many amazing people from around the world. I thank you all for following and sharing your ideas with me and look forward to what this next year has in store.

So let's CELEBRATE!!

What better way to celebrate with you, than to have a giveaway with some of my wonderful bloggy friends from

We have a collection of early literacy, math, and science activities to share with you! Here is a little preview:

What can you do to win?

Visit one or all of my bloggy friends (by clicking on the pictures above) and come back to leave me a comment about what you love about their blog! You will get one entry for each separate comment you leave. While you are visiting, make sure you become a follower so that you do not miss an amazing post from any of these amazing blogs.

I will choose a winner on Wednesday March 7, 2012.

Winners must be a USA resident, 18 years of older. I will choose a winner by using the Random Number Generator.

Thanks and good luck!

Are you a Stylish Teaching Mommy?

Do you know Allison from

If you don't, I recommend you definitely hop on over to her blog! She is a wonderful kindergarten teacher who shares great resources, activities, and lessons used right in her classroom. Although we have never met in person, Allison is actually a teacher in a neighboring district.

(Hopefully we will be able to meet up soon Allison!)

Well, she has started another blog that I am sure will be amazing, called

Her tagline states, "Where Style and Fashion Meet Bake Sales and Play Dates." She plans to feature fashion finds, easy recipes, and other fun things! Sounds great to me! I love to hear about fashion finds and easy to make recipes to fit into a teacher's budget and schedule!!
Head on over to check her out. I think she plans to do a giveaway soon!!

Common Core Standards Flip Chart

If you "Like" my Facebook page, you may remember a post I shared back on February 16th. Mentoring Minds was giving away FREE Common Core Standards Strategies Flip Charts to thank their Facebook fans for their continued support. They gave the flip chart to the first 50 people that signed up. And guess who just received one in the mail?

Yuppers...me!!

Here is a picture I snapped of it:

It includes all of the CCS for K-5 ELA and Math! This will be a great addition to my instructional resources toolbox and will come in handy since I am across multiple grade levels. I am very excited, as I hardly ever win anything!

And in case you happen to somehow read this,
THANK YOU Mentoring Minds!

Oh, I guess I also won something else today...the wonderful diagnosis of strep. (I knew my body was fighting something!)

Hey, do you think that I should get out and play the lottery??

(Please note, I am in no way affiliated with Mentoring Minds or am receiving any type of compensation for this post. I am just sharing my excitement with you all for actually winning something!)

A Snow Day and Donors Choose

Today was our first snow day of the year! (Strange having our first snow day fall in March.) I was excited, thinking that it would give me some time to create something fantastic to share with you guys. Unfortunately, I found it hard to get off the couch today. I just couldn't get my body to get up, which is very unlike me (usually I can't sit still for very long)! So I think I am definitely fighting something off (yet again), and was happy to have the opportunity to stay home on the couch.

I did get outside with my honey to play in the snow. We built a snowman, a snow fort, and did some sledding! Here she is, a little wet but VERY happy nonetheless!

I thought I would share something that I started a few weeks ago. My first Donors Choose project for some

hands-on phonological awareness materials and CVC game boards! I did have a widget on the side, but it didn't look right so I took it down, but you can view it by clicking on the picture below.