And the Winner is.....

My night with Laura Numeroff was so much fun!! I really enjoyed listening to her talk about growing up, her interests, and her books. She was very funny!! She mentioned the next book in the "If You Give a series...." Looks like its brownies in the near future. I even got to have a little blogging conversation with her!! :)

The lucky winner of the autographed copy of The Jellybeans and the Big Book Bonanza is Michelle from Apples and ABC's!! Michelle- send me your address at April.Larremore@gpisd.org and I will send you your  new autographed book!! Yah!!

Thanks to all of you who entered!! I wish I could have brought back books for everyone!!

Nonfiction Writing

My very first friend in the blogging world was Jonelle from A Place Called Kindergarten. All these years later and I still love all her great ideas and posts!!

I absolutely loved these two ideas!!

Write and draw about where readers like to read. Check out her post here. 

I always love Jonelle's writing posts!

I had never seen these books before. What a great series!! There are others in the series beside the ones below. You can check them all out on Amazon. 

 

Jonelle had her kids make these great nonfiction books patterned after the ones above. 

check out her post "nonfiction" to see the rest of the pages

Fast Finisher Management Tool

We all have those kids who finish everything they do fast and well. Here is a great tool for changing up what they can do when they finish early.

This tip came from Mrs. Ricca's Kindergarten post "Fast Finisher/Do Now Cards." You can find the original idea and a free download of the cards from What the Teacher Wants.

A Writing I Will Go....

Lately I have been on a search for any information, tips, suggestions, lessons, or ideas I can find on helping young children grown as writers. I just came across this great tip from Kindergarten Rocks!

Here is an easy way to quickly review what good writers do each time they write. Call on a student to pull a reminder card out of the bag. Then have them share with their classmates what they need to remember to do when they write. You can download a free copy of these sentence reminders from the post "Who Let the Writing Out?"

Sight Word Fun with Faux Technology

Here is a little faux technology for you to add to your literacy stations....

From Making Learning Fun

From Making Learning Fun you can download the keyboard to print on legal size paper and word strips for sight words, color words, and number words. 

From Mrs. Bremer's Kindergarten

Students can practice writing the sight words by texting and typing them on their phones and iPads and then place their words in ABC order on their iPods. 

Students write their words first and then "text" or "type" them. 

You can get a free download of the phone from Dragonflies in First. 

You can get a free download of the iPod from Teacher Tipster.

Print words on the discs. Then students print the words from the playlist at the top in ABC order. 

You can get a free download of the iPad from Mrs. Gilchrist's Class.

Trash or Treasure??

Here is a great literacy station idea from Julie Lee....

Have students get a trash ball, un-wad it, and read it to decide if it's a real word or a made up word. 

Variation: Write sight words on the crumpled sheets of paper. Spell some of them correctly and some of them incorrectly. Students get a trash ball, un-wad it and decide if the sight word is spelled correctly or incorrectly. 

Play-doh Container Sound Game

Just found this on one of my sister's Pinterest boards. The original idea with the pin is to use these empty play-doh containers for an ABC Name Hunt. You could easily adapt the idea for your other things such as a sound hunt, a blend hunt, etc.

1) Add alphabet stickers to the bottom of the play-doh containers. You can add single letters or blends. 

2) Print out picture word cards to go with the letters or blends you used and cut them out. Depending on your activity, you may or may not want the words printed on the cards. 

3)  Randomly place the picture cards around your classroom. 

4) To play: Have students search the room for pictures that belong in the empty play-doh cans and return the pictures to the right can. For example, if a student finds a picture of a chicken, they would put it in the "ch" can. Each play-doh can could hold more than one picture. If your students need more structure for this activity, you could provide them with a word list or a picture list so they know what they are looking for. 

Variation: You can do this with tiny objects instead of pictures cards. You can also vary what students search for- beginning sounds, middle sounds, ending sounds, blends, etc. You can try making word families on the tops of the cans and looking for rhyming words too. You can use mini play-doh cans, regular sized play-doh cans, or empty icing containers.