Slide your Words

My fellow first grade teachers and I have a center called "Slide Your Words". In this center, the kids actually slide words out of envelopes and have to segment while they slide to figure out what the word is. This is what it looks like:

We work on a different sound weekly (vowels, diagraphs, blends) and the words used in the "Slide your Words" center correlate with what we are working on that week. There is also a recording sheet that goes along with this center that is available here.

This center can be good practice at home too!

Here is another link for some of the actual strips that are used with the words and graphics. All you have to do is print on cardstock, laminate, and cut into strips.

Hope this is helpful to you, like it is for us :)
Enjoy!!

New Center

I have been super busy the past couple weeks. Only a week and a half left of my graduate classes and for a minute there I was a bit overwhelmed! My room was looking CRAZY and everyday this week I felt like there was one more thing.. almost forgot the progress reports on Tuesday! Finally got it together in time for a 3 day weekend. This morning I made a little center for the next couple weeks using a new grammar concept we are starting: subjects and predicates.

Click here to get a copy for yourself!

I have so much more to share, but of course I forgot to take pictures before I left school yesterday! Have a happy Easter :)

Contest!!

If you click here you can check a fun Spring Contest on Erica's blog. Plus you can read some fabulous ideas she has!!

Time is ticking away...

Seriously, I think my sleep time is ticking away..ha! Any normal person would be going to bed right now but I am pretty much addicted to teacher blogs/ing! My husband definitly thinks I am a crazy person!
Anyway we have been working on time this week and a teacher friend of mine gave me a GREAT idea to teach time. It has been hard for my kiddos to catch on to the minute hand. In whole group they count by fives and we have no problem then they go back to their seat and write something like 12:6 instead of 12:30. That is the kind of thing that makes you want to pull your hair out! So another teacher on my team gave me this idea and I love it!
To begin the lesson each student is given 5 unifix cubes. They put them together and trace them on an index card. Then they color what they traced and cut them out so it is a replica of the unifix cubes. Then they brought their cut out to the carpet and we stood in a circle counting by 5's.
Then we taped the cut outs to the whiteboard in a circular shape and counted by 5's again. After this we added the numbers to our clock. So now it looks like a clock with 5 minutes between each hour.

Then we practiced with this clock for a while and they seemed to understand about the minute and hour differences. The next day the kids made their own clock like we made on the board. After they added their unifix cube cut outs, they colored each half a different color so they could remember that at half an hour you would be at the 6. It worked out pretty good- and turned out cute too!

So time will continue this week...