IT'S ABOUT TIME for GROUNDHOG DAY

 

Celebrate this fun holiday with 2 resources:

Groundhog Day Hink Pinks, Hinky Pinkies, & Hinkity Pinkities is a super fun freebie!

These word riddles teach students to problem solve while honing vocabulary skills.  This product is available as task cards and digitally on TPT Easel.

SCRATTLE is a differentiated, math and literacy, learning center activity that combines word work with computation; individual effort with competition.

Students make words, as in ScrabbleTM, computing their worth.  Then they engage another learner in a friendly battle to see which child has the most high scores.  SCRABBLE + BATTLE = SCRATTLE.  The word warriors will quickly eschew the easy, low scoring words in order to create more complex and higher scoring words.  Thus, offer your pupils the chance to play several times.  They will love it and you will enjoy seeing the uptick in their efforts.

BTW, I offer 7 SCRATTLE products in my store and all of them have just been updated and refreshed.  So, if you already have some SCRATTLE in your resource library, download the new versions!

I've been refreshing and renewing lots of products lately.  As with SCRATTLE, you can download the new versions for FREE if you already own the previous version. 

HOW TO PLAY SUDOKU is a slideshow that explains and illustrates the terminology, procedures, and strategies for completing sudoku puzzles.  The revisions include all new graphics and compacting the slideshow.

Related to sudoku are my Latin Squares products.  They are great for easing into sudoku and are all freshly redone.

These QUESTION WORDS POSTERS have not only been refreshed with all new graphics, but the product has been expanded.  Even if you don't already own it, you can download it for FREE.

ATTITUDE POSTER is a FREEBIE that has been refreshed with new graphics.

IT'S ABOUT TIME FOR GROUNDHOG DAY FREEBIES!

Although February is the shortest month, it is surely packed with more holiday and seasonal topics than any other month.  It starts off with Groundhog Day.

Bring the celebration to your students with these FREEBIES:

SCRATTLE is fun activity that is packed with learning.  Similar to SCRABBLETM, learners will make words from a set of letters.  But what makes this more fun, and more importantly, elicits more learning, is that scores are not simply the result of addition.  This DIFFERENTIATED center can combine addition, subtraction, and/or multiplication.  You choose which recording sheet is most appropriate for your students.

But wait, ...

there's more ...

After making their words, children engage in a BATTLE with a friend (or 2).  They will compare their words, determining who has the most high value words.  Prepare to be amazed. After the 1st battle, your learners will be clamoring to have a do-over. Suddenly, all of those easy, high frequency words will be eschewed for vocabulary that yields higher scores.  It makes my teacher heart swell when I see my kiddos start exercising their vocabularies and begin to strategize how to get ever higher scores.

This video may make this activity easier to understand:

For more Groundhog Day fun, try Hink Pinks, Hinky Pinkies, and Hinkity Pinkities.  

These task cards challenge your students to problem solve while applying vocabulary skills, such as synonyms, parts of speech, rhymes, definitions, and syllables.  You can almost see the cogs turning in their brains as they determine the 2 word answers to these riddles. 

Did I mention this product is FREE???

Here's a video to entice you...

My students literally beg to do Hink Pinks, et al.  I'm willing to bet your's will, too.

And now, Hink Pinks, et al. are available digitally on TPT's Easel platform!  Woo hoo!

Happy Groundhog Day and hurry up spring!

It's About Time for FREEBIES!

It's about time, teachers, for 

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is almost here.  This FREEBIE is perfect for upper grade classes.

POETRY POSSIBILITIES for MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. DAY contains 2 poems. Each poem is accompanied by custom designed teaching points covering a variety of skills. These poems are copy ready and, thus, may be added to your students’ poetry anthologies. The range of reading levels in these poems makes them appropriate for all intermediate classrooms and provides for differentiation.

It's also the time of year that classes celebrate the 100th day of school.  Primary teachers will enjoy this FREEBIE!

There are 4 poems in Poetry Possibilities -- 100th Day of School Edition. Each poem has a teaching point related to poetry and teaching possibilities from multiple disciplines that are custom designed for them.

It will soon be Groundhog Day.  I have 2 FREEBIES for that special day.

Groundhog Day Hink Pinks, Hinky Pinkies, & Hinkity Pinkities are the perfect way to celebrate this just-for-fun holiday in your intermediate classroom.  Your students will work on language arts skills, critical thinking, and problem solving with these fun word riddles.

Groundhog Day Scrattle is a differentiated, math and  literacy, learning center activity that combines word work with computation; individual effort with competition. As in Scrabble™, students use a set of letters to create words. After recording their words, they calculate each word’s score using the letter values. Then they engage a friend in a battle wherein they compare their scores using >, <, and =. The student with the most >s wins the battle! (SCRAbble + baTTLE = SCRATTLE!)  Because this FREEBIE is differentiated, it is appropriate for ALL elementary classrooms.

Enjoy the FREEBIES!  Coming soon will be more FREEBIES just for Valentine's Day.

You may also like:

February: Do What You Love

One of the things I love to do with my students is immerse them in poetry because it offers so many teaching possibilities. Naturally you can focus on poetic structures and poetic devices. But have you ever used poetry to teach reading skills? Because poetry is usually short and the message concise, it's a perfect venue for studying vowel sounds, contractions, punctuation, parts of speech, syllables, rimes, inflections, .... The  possibilities are nearly endless. It's always good practice to relate these skills to what is being read. Practicing skills in isolation may transfer to reading skill building; then again it may not.  

Does it sound daunting to combine poetry with ELA skills?  It doesn't have to be. As the ELA coach for my elementary building, I determined that poetry was generally intimidating to my teachers, or at least viewed as a luxury that may not receive much attention. Resolving to change that, I began giving my teachers units of poetry with "possibilities" for using it in the classroom.  Since I work with K-5 teachers and students, these Poetry Possibilities units have applications for all elementary levels.

Poems have reading skills already built into them.  All you have to do is look at it with a "reading skills eye." Thus, if the poem is replete with a particular consonant blend, use it in a guided reading lesson about that blend.  If the poem has a sprinkling of contractions, devise a review lesson about contractions using the poem.  As an example, look at the following poem, noting that it has several compound words in it.

Due to the structure of a poem, it is easier for young children to locate the compound words. If you reproduced this poem on sentence strips for use in a pocket chart, that would facilitate identifying the compound words as a group.  With a little magic and masking tape, you could make the compound words come apart. Alternately, you might focus on the punctuation and how it helps the reader to read with expression and fluency. Or, you might choose to conduct a mini-lesson on contractions. For example, the Possibilities for the above poem include:

If you are interested in more seasonal poems with teaching points and skill suggestions, visit my TpT store here. For February poems and possibilities, I have 3 (!) products: Black History Month Poetry Possibilities, February Poetry Possibilities, and  Poetry Possibilities for Winter.  Another unit, 100th Day of School Poetry Possibilities, is useful this time of year, as well. (Better yet, it's FREE!!) 

As a reading specialist, I highly recommend using poems for guided reading lessons and review lessons.  It has always been a favorite activity of my remedial students if for no other reason than they had less text to conquer.  Just a word of caution: reading poetry is principally about creating enthusiasm for reading.  Take care not to defeat that goal by always turning poetry reading into a skill drill.

As proof of just how much I love teaching with poetry, I present my Poetry Possibilities units:

Groundhog Day Center Freebie

Scrabble™ and its social networking cousin, Words with Friends™, are jumping off the computer screen and finding their niche in the classroom.  In my classroom, my students love to play SCRATTLE (SCRAbble + baTTLE).

It's always great fun to take a set of letters and challenge your class to make as many words with them as they can.  In Scrattle, I'm upping the ante by adding a math component and competition.  By doing so, I'm ensuring that my students are trying their hardest and I'm getting double duty out of this center.

Here's how it works:

• Give your students the letter set for this edition of Scrattle.

• Students cut out the letters.
• Students find a partner to battle.
• Armed with a recording sheet, the partners record the words they can devise individually.
• Once their recording sheets are filled, the students calculate the values of their words by adding the numbers on their letter pieces.
• Alternatively, older students calculate the value by multiplying the numbers.
• To differentiate for G/T and enrichment students, a combination of operations is available.  (It is possible that this version will create negative numbers.)
• After their calculations are completed, the partners compare their numbers, filling in their opponent's scores on the recording sheet. 
• Students then add >, <, or = to the scores box.
• The student with the most > scores is the winner.

This activity is CCSS aligned.  You can download it on Google Docs.

Enjoy!

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