Words, Words, Words!

I love words! I think one of my favorite parts of teaching is helping my kiddos learn words. Learning how to spell words, finding chunks in words, how many syllables in words, word meanings, and it goes on and on. I think we all agree that it is important to introduce our kiddos to lots of words, in lots of different ways. Today I thought I would share some of the fun ways I introduce words to my kiddos.

When I'm teaching a new phoneme I like to start with an anchor chart. I like my kiddos to build it with me and then they can use it and refer back to it over and over again. 

I often follow up an anchor chart with a booklet where they can sort words or see words in lots of different fonts. Sometimes my kiddos work in small groups and unscramble sentences that have the words we are working on. They love this! Sometimes the groups race to complete the sentences. When their group is done they get to ring my teacher bell. They love that!

When teaching a vowel team that makes several sounds, I try to make it a big deal so that my kiddos will remember all the sounds. We often sing a song, do a craft, put it on a headband to wear all week, put words on hands and post them on the door frame so they can high five the words and read them every time they go out of the room. Whatever it takes for them to learn the sound. 

One of my kiddos favorite ways to learn words was our fly swatter activity. We used fly swatters that I purchased at The Dollar Tree. Each student gets a set of word cards. If the cards all have the same vowel sound then I would say a word and they would find it and swat it. I might also say find a word that rhymes with...

If I had words with the same vowels that had different sounds such as ough I would say find a word that has the same sound as .... There are only two rules. They all had to start in the ready position (which was fly swatter against their chest) and once they swatted a word, the fly swatter stayed on the word until I said. This kept the fly swatters where they were supposed to be and not hitting each other. 

I hope this has helped you think of teaching words and sounds in more of a hands on way. If you are looking for word cards, fluency strips, word booklets, games and crafts, then check out my Word Detective Series in my TPT store BY CLICKING HERE.