IT'S ABOUT TIME for TALK LIKE A PIRATE DAY!

 

September 19 is TALK LIKE A PIRATE DAY!  

Avast! Are ye looking for some resources to use on this special day? Try this antonym activity:

Ye have found a pirate’s booty in this resource. In AHOY! ANTONYMS Literacy Center, students match words with their opposites. These materials are provided in print and digitally on TPT Easel.

Ye might also like to introduce the rules of syllabication with help from these buccaneers:

Display these syllables anchor charts in your classroom to make the syllable division rules easy for children to understand. Every poster includes an example word to further illustrate the rule. Syllable division is included in every elementary level of CCSS.

IT'S ABOUT TIME for a NEW YEAR and NEW HINK PINKS, et al.

 

There are new HINK PINKS, et al. available!  I just completed this product and uploaded it to TPT.  Fans of these fun riddles will find these challenging, both in subject matter and vocabulary.  Creatures from myths, folktales, and fairy tales are the focus.  Some may be unfamiliar to students. To help your learners out, I've included a 3 page Mythical Creatures Guide.

You can decide if you want to provide this aide, or compel your students to do some research.

Here's a sample:

There are so many things to love about HINK PINKS, et al.  These task cards provide work on definitions, synonyms, parts of speech, rimes, vocabulary, & grammar.  They also promote critical thinking; specifically making inferences, interpreting data, & drawing conclusions. The very best part is that students absolutely love them.  Year after year, my charges literally beg to do these word riddles.

If you love HINK PINKS, et al., and I'm sure you will, you will find about 3 dozen products in my store.  Several are FREE!  Try them before you buy them.  MYTHICAL CREATURES HINK PINKS, et al. are also available digitally on TPT Easel.

USING POETRY in the CLASSROOM -- Pt. 4

It's about time, teachers, to explore more possibilities for using poetry in the classroom.  Today's focus is GRAMMAR.

One of the chief reasons I like to use poetry for grammar lessons is that the subject of the lesson is usually quite obvious in the poem.  For example, the following poem practically begs you to teach PUNCTUATION. 

How many punctuation marks you focus on depends entirely on the age and learning stage of your students.  You can see how easy it is to focus on a particular punctuation mark in this poem.  If you are lucky enough to have a smart board, this becomes an interactive lesson.  If, like me, you do not have that resource, you can copy the poem on chart paper and let the students interact with that copy.  Your grammar lesson can be as simple as identifying the punctuation marks, reviewing the role of these marks, or more in-depth instruction about the correct use of less common punctuation such as dashes and semi-colons.

A focus on punctuation in poetry also provides a wonderful opportunity to teach your students to “read the punctuation.”  Modeling the expression that punctuation invokes is an invaluable aid to teaching fluent reading.  In fact, reading poetry is the #1 way to improve fluency!  When you model reading the punctuation, overemphasize the changes in pace, voice, breath, etc.  By teaching your students to "read the punctuation," you will be enhancing comprehension, too!

Poetry can also be used to study PARTS OF SPEECH.  The following poem is one I like to use when studying verbs.  It has a nice variety of action words and I love to point out the verbs the poet chose to use in place of some “tired” ones.

A bonus with this poem is the extensive use of personification.  While you may not think a lesson on personification is appropriate for 1st graders, in order to truly understand the poem, your students will need to realize that the “I” in the poem is the March wind.  Obviously, for older students, personification is an appropriate lesson and is beautifully illustrated in this poem.

Virtually every poem has a grammar lesson hiding in it, just waiting to jump out at you.  All that’s required is to start looking at poems differently.  Try using fresh eyes to identify possible grammar lessons in this poem:

How did you do?  Here some teaching points I found:

1. The importance of using capital letters for months of the year; how hard would it be to understand this poem if it  didn’t have a capital M on the name of the month?

2. Homonyms could be studied, starting with merry/marry/Mary and/or I/eye/aye.

3. The vowel digraph /ay/ is plentiful in this poem.  You may want to make an anchor chart for this digraph.  Extend the learning by including other digraphs for the long a sound.

4. Review punctuation and “reading the punctuation.”  The hyphen may be new to your students.  This is a perfect vehicle for studying it.

5. Identify parts of speech: nouns, verbs, pronouns, adjectives…

Check back soon for more ideas about using poetry in the classroom. 

You can find more possibilities for teaching with poetry in --

12 Days of Christmas -- Day 5

Today's 12 Days of Christmas gift is Christmas Hink Pinks, et al. These vocabulary riddles are wildly popular with teachers and students alike.  My kiddos literally beg to do more Hink Pinks!

Christmas Hink Pinks, Hinky Pinkies, Hinkity Pinkities, and Hitinkity Pitinkities are not only great for exercising critical thinking, but are perfect for corralling some of that holiday excitement. When you share Hink Pinks, et al., with your class, you will be giving them learning disguised as fun. They will work on vocabulary, parts of speech, synonyms, rimes, making inferences, and interpreting data. That hits a lot of CCS Standards.

If you are not familiar with Hink Pinks, et al., here's an explanation of them:

You can unwrap this gift for free, but only for 48 hours.  So follow this link to my TPT store and download your copy.

Check out these Hink Pink products, too:

Let's Talk Turkey

It's about time teachers ... for Thanksgiving!  So let's talk turkey - Let's Talk Turkey Words, that is. This is a new product I've posted on TpT and TN. Because I have so very much to be thankful for, I have listed it for FREE!

As you probably guessed, Let's Talk Turkey Words is a language arts activity.  It is perfect for literacy centers, small group instruction, and as an activity for fast finishers.  There are letter tiles for 4 seasonal words -- Thanksgiving, Pilgrims, turkey, & Mayflower.  Each word is in a different color to assist you in getting the right letters to each student.

The goal is for students to create as many words as they can from the letters in their set.  At a center or in a small group, giving each child a different set of letters has proven to discourage Billy-the-Borrower from simply copying his friend's list of words.  

Let's Talk Turkey Words exercises your students' abilities to be fluent and flexible in thought and oral language.  It will also inform you about your students' command of common spelling patterns and sight words.

Used for differentiation, this activity readily accommodates the differences in word generating abilities.  You can make the task more challenging for your higher functioning students by - 

• denying them the right to make words with less than 3 letters 
• requiring 2 or more syllables
• allowing them to use common suffixes, such as -ed, er, or -ing, despite not having those letters before them
• giving parts of speech parameters (5 verbs, 7 nouns, 3 adverbs, 4 adjectives, ...)
• etc.

Copy the letter sets on cardstock, laminate, and cut apart.  A recording sheet is provided. This product is CCSS aligned for you.  You're welcomed!

You can get Let's Talk Turkey Words on TpT or TN.  While you are there, check out my other turkey centers and activities:

and my original book, Where is the Thanksgiving Turkey?  It is an emergent reader perfect for practicing chunking and phrasing.

Check out Classroom Freebies Manic Mondays

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving!

USING POETRY IN THE CLASSROOM – Part 4 -- GRAMMAR

It's about time, teachers, to explore more possibilities for using poetry in the classroom. One of the chief reasons I like to use poetry for grammar lessons is that the subject of the lesson is usually quite obvious in the poem.  For example, the following poem practically begs you to teach punctuation. 

How many punctuation marks you focus on depends entirely on the age and learning stage of your students.  You can see how easy it is to focus on a particular punctuation mark in this poem.  If you are lucky enough to have a smart board, this becomes an interactive lesson.  If, like me, you do not have that resource, you can copy the poem on chart paper and let the students interact with that copy. 

A focus on punctuation in poetry also provides a wonderful opportunity to teach your students to “read the punctuation.”  Modeling the expression punctuation calls for is an invaluable aid to teaching fluent reading.  In fact, reading poetry is the #1 way to improve fluency!

The following poem is one I like to use when studying verbs.  It has a nice variety of action words and I love to point out the verbs the poet chose to use in place of some “tired” ones.

A bonus with this poem is the extensive use of personification.  While you may not think a lesson on personification is appropriate for 1^st graders, in order to truly understand the poem, your students will need to realize that the “I” in the poem is the March wind.  Obviously, for older students, personification is an appropriate lesson and is beautifully illustrated in this poem.

Virtually every poem has a grammar lesson hiding in it, just waiting to jump out at you.  All that’s required is to start looking at poems differently.  Try using fresh eyes to identify possible grammar lessons in this poem:

How did you do?  Here some teaching points I found:

1. The importance of using capital letters for months of the  year; how hard would it be to understand this poem if it didn’t have a capital M on the name of the month?

2. Homonyms could be studied starting with merry/marry/Mary and/or I/eye/aye.

3. The vowel digraph /ay/ is plentiful in this poem.  You may want to make an anchor chart for this digraph.  Extend the learning by including other digraphs for the long a sound.

4. Review punctuation and “reading the punctuation.”  The hyphen may be new to your students.  This is a perfect vehicle for studying it.

5. Identify parts of speech: nouns, verbs, pronouns, adjectives…

Be sure to hop back soon for more ideas about using poetry in the classroom.

You can find more possibilities for teaching with poetry in --

Groundhog Day 3.0

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 almost 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.  

Each poem has reading skills already built into it.  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.  Or, you might choose to conduct a mini-lesson on the inflections -ing and -ed.

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.

While wearing my other hat, enrichment specialist, I developed Poetry Possibilities for my colleagues with teaching points identified for them.  For example, the Possibilities  for the above poem include:

As item #3 indicates, poetry can also be a launchpad for differentiating instruction.  Gifted and talented students deserve and require our attention, but it can be quite taxing to provide extensions for them.  I have dedicated most of my career to creating challenges for G/T children.  Most of my products on TpT reflect that commitment.  I hope you will go here to check out my critical and creative thinking products.

If you are interested in more seasonal poems with teaching points and skill suggestions, visit my TpT store here for February poems and possibilities.  You may also be interested in Black History Month Poetry Possibilities.  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.