February Centers and Freebies

It's about time, teachers, to focus on February.

I'd like you to keep calm and focus on some new centers for your classroom.  

Friendly Frog's Valentine's Day Syllables Center is a low prep literacy center. Friendly Frog appears in many of my syllabication products. This time he challenges your students to sort word cards according to whether they have a prefix or a suffix.

February sports a lot of pink, so you may like Valentine's Day Hink Pinks, Hinky Pinkies, and Hinkity Pinkities.  These riddles that evoke pairs of rhyming words, are wildly popular. They work well in a literacy center, as an anchor activity, a sponge activity, and are the perfect challenge for fast finishers. This set is FREE! So download your copy now.

Scrattle: The Valentine's Day Edition is also FREE!  This center combines word work with computation and spurs your students to create more difficult words through competition.  It really and truly is appropriate for K through 5th grade because you can effortlessly differentiate for math abilities.  3 different recording sheets are provided.  One requires students to use addition, 1 calls for multiplication, and the 3rd uses mixed operations (+, -, x) with parentheses. My students beg for Scrattle. As a result, there are many versions available and all of them are FREE! 

Have you heard?  It's Freebie February in my TPT store.  Each day this month, a different priced item will be offered for FREE for just one day. So check in daily to see what I'm giving away.  

Today's offering is How Many Ways? -- February Edition. This product, like Scrattle, is appropriate for all elementary grade levels. It is a critical thinking, interactive bulletin board activity that could be used as a center, an enrichment challenge, an anchor activity, and/or for differentiation. You can read more about it here.

Winter Break Readiness

Before you start your winter break, though, make it a true break from your teaching duties by planning for January now.  You want to start the new year refreshed and prepared.  I'd like to help you do that. 

For years, I've been creating and utilizing centers for elementary students.  Let my work make your life easier. You need literacy centers.  Check these out:

Whether you teach The Mitten or not, this center is perfect for primary classrooms.  It's foci are initial consonant blends and rhyming words.  Your students will manipulate the 18 mitten cards to find 9 pairs of mittens.  Naturally, you can choose to use fewer cards if that is more appropriate to your class.  This center also has a recording sheet for your convenience.  

 

For older students, try Friendly Frog's Leap Frog Game.  

This center requires students to determine the number of syllables in words that pertain to frogs, bogs, and logs. They move their game pieces as many places as their word has syllables.  The center has a game board, 54 word or action cards, 6 game pieces, file folder labels. 

In the spirit of the season, I am planning several FLASH FREEBIES this week.  The above centers might be among the gifts I offer.  Check my facebook page for announcements of the flash freebies.  

More Back to School Time Savers

While there is no magic recipe for setting up your room and preparing to meet your students, there are many things that can ease you into it. I have a few suggestions for items to include in your backpack that may help alleviate some of the stress of going back to school. 

If you teach emergent readers, you know that word work is an essential component of reading instruction.  As a Reading Recovery teacher, I have spent years honing this aspect of literacy education. You can reap some benefits from my experience by perusing my 8 part blog series that starts here.  You may also wish to check out Word Work: A Guide for Teachers of Young Children.  

If blank bulletin boards bother you, download these FREE writing posters that coordinate with 6 Traits of Quality Writing. They can stay up all year!  Did I mention that they are FREE?

As students progress in reading and writing, an essential skill is breaking words into syllables.  Syllabication skills are included in EVERY elementary grade level of the CCSS.  As a literacy specialist, I have come to recognize that many struggling readers and writers do not have a good grasp of these skills.  Take some time to teach syllabication. The return is huge!

To help you with this task, I have several editions of Rules of Syllabication products that make excellent bulletin boards and/or center anchor charts.  The rules in each of the following are the same; the graphics and size of the posters vary by theme.

You may also like the Under the Sea Edition Bundle which includes the rule posters from the Under the Sea Edition above and a delightfully animated power point presentation.

As you are preparing centers and small groups, you may find the following syllabication activities helpful.  Friendly Frog's Syllables Book and Friendly Frog in Outer Space are both well suited to small group instruction or independent work.

Friendly Frog is very popular with my students.  Hence, he is a frequent visitor to our centers. The kiddos are always excited to see him back.  You can find these centers here.

Until next time...

What the Teacher Said

Having been a teacher for more than 30 years, I've said a lot.  But that's not what this post is about.  This post is about what teachers have said about my products.

My teaching passions are many, but chief among them are materials that promote critical thinking and problem solving.  My appetite for this was first whetted wwwaaaaayyyyy back in my second year of teaching when I attended a state conference on gifted education.  It was there that I was first introduced to the  critical thinking activity, Hink Pinks, and their cousins, Hinky Pinkies and Hinkity Pinkities.  

 My enthusiasm for Hink Pinks et al. has never waned.  Indeed, I have used them with every class from 1st grade to 5th. It takes a little more prompting to get 1st graders to combine syllable constraints with synonyms, but there is nothing more rewarding than seeing that "lightbulb moment" when a little one gets it.

You can see examples of my Hink Pinks et al. by going here.  Several of them are free! If you try them, I think you will like them. But, you don't have to take my word for it.  Here's what the teachers said:

If you would like to check out my Hink Pink et al. products, click here.  By the way, they are CCSS aligned.

Texting Poetry

In this age of texting mania, engage your students in a safe "texting" activity that will produce some "phone-tastic" poetry. Challenge them to write Phone Number Poetry.  It's easy, fun, and will produce poetry with a new "ring" to it.

Have each student write his/her phone number vertically on a piece of paper.  Each digit represents the number of words to write in that line of the poem.  (If the phone number contains a zero, they should write 10 words on that line.) After selecting a topic, they can begin writing their free verse poem.

Google Doc

An alternate idea for this "texting" is to have the digits represent the number of syllables in each line.  For older, more capable students, challenge them to write lines of alliteration using 1 of the letters assigned to that number on the phone.  If, for example, one of the digits is a 2, an alliterative line could be:

Clever conversations

Or, a line for the digit 4 could be:

Giddy girls gabbing, giggling

The topic of these poems may be one you assign or the choice of the poet.  A fun, if obvious, topic is cell phones. With all the smart phones available today, students can expand their thoughts on phones to include games, web browsing, email, maps, photos, videos, yelp, ...

It's about time for National Poetry Month.  So call up this fun poetry activity.  You are sure to enjoy these "messages!"  

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Valentine's Day Syllables Center

As we all pull out our February files and begin preparing centers for the plethora of special topics in that month, I thought I would share about my syllables center for Valentine's Day.  

Friendly Frog is my students' syllabication friend.  He appears frequently in our centers, helping everyone learn the somewhat tricky rules for using syllabication skills in decoding and recording words.  For Valentine's Day, he is helping my students to focus on prefixes and suffixes.

Using these work mats, students sort Valentine cards.

There are 24 cards and a recording sheet, as well as labels for the center folder.  

This activity is aligned with the CCSS and is most appropriate for grades 1 - 3.  Did you know there are syllabication standards for EVERY elementary grade?  There are!  To help my class retain the syllabication rules, I have a permanent display of 16 rules. Naturally, they feature Friendly Frog and are available in Friendly Frog's Rules of Syllabication.

If you are interested in introducing Friendly Frog to your students, you can find these products in my TpT Store and my TN Shop.  Try them.  You'll like them.

Friendly Frog's products include: