Literacy Centers for Turkey Time

It's about time, teachers, for some literacy centers especially created for this time of year.

Your students will love working on vocabulary, parts of speech, synonyms, rimes, making inferences, and interpreting data while having fun with Thanksgiving Hink Pinks, Hinky Pinkies, and Hinkity Pinkities.  

If you are not familiar with Hink Pinks, et al., you are in for a treat.  Hink Pinks are riddles wherein the clues lead you to a 2 word answer. Each answer word must have just one syllable and the 2 words must rhyme. Hinky Pinkies are 2 word rhymes with 2 syllables in each word. Hinkity Pinkities are rhyming word pairs with 3 syllables each.  For example:

The answer to this riddle is raise maize.  

This product includes 20 cards with Thanksgiving themed clues and, naturally, an answer sheet. Copy the cards on cardstock (pink, of course), then laminate them for years of use. I recommend solving several clues together to ensure your students’ success. This activity is CCSS aligned.

Turkey Drumsticks uses Thanksgiving vocabulary to practice constructing compound words. Students search for two drumsticks that form a compound word when joined together. They place the pairs on plates until they have found all 9 compound words. 

A recording sheet is included. The recording sheet requires students to write the compound words they found and apply them to the context of the sentences.

Turkey Tails requires students to focus on the long and short vowel sounds of a & e. 

After determining the vowel sound of the word on each tail feather, they will place the feather on the turkey with that vowel symbol. The words used are taken from the first 200 words on the Fry lists. 

This center contains 4 full color work mats, 28 full color feathers, labels for your center folder, and a black & white recording sheet.

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.  

Give each student the letters for one of the 4 seasonal words. Challenge them to create as many words as they can using that set of letters. A recording sheet is included.  This center is CCSS aligned and it's FREE!

Scrattle: Thanksgiving Edition is a learning center 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 Scrabble™ letter values. Then they engage a friend in a battle wherein they compare their scores using >, <, and =. 

The student with the most > wins the battle! BTW, Scrattle derives it names from SCRAbble + baTTLE. 

SCRATTLE can be played by students with simple addition capabilities, multiplication abilities, as well as those skilled in solving mixed operations in complex equations. Three different recording sheets are included, providing instant differentiation. This center is also FREE!

It's about turkey time, teachers!  Fill your centers with turkey goodness.

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Poetry for Fall & What to do with It

Poetry is a great tool for teaching more than rhymes, rhythm, and poetic devices. It can be a vehicle for exploring a host of different language arts topics. For example, the following poem is replete with contractions. 

So, after presenting the poem to your class, conduct a lesson on contractions. This could be a whole group lesson or a small group effort, depending on the ages and needs of your students. It could also be a literacy center activity with individual copies for each student and the directive to highlight the contractions. Then the task could require pupils to write the 2 component words for each contraction on the back of the poem or another sheet of paper.

Quotation marks are also prevalent in this poem. Hence, you could use this poem to study quotation marks, speaker tags, and the various rules that quotation marks invoke in reading and writing. This can be especially effective if you engage your students in choral readings of the poem. 

Assign one student to read all of the narration and speaker tags, while the remaining children chime in with the quotations. You will love the focus this generates.  

In my experience, children, especially reluctant readers, find poetry less threatening to read than prose. Perhaps it's due to the expansive white space.  Maybe it's the rhyme and rhythm (when present) that aids predictability and fluency. Whatever the reason, the light that shines in my Title I students' eyes when I bring out a poem is undeniable.  And that is enough to cause me to use poetry everyday.

If you are interested in more ideas for using poetry to teach myriad topics, check out my Poetry Possibilities products. They provide the poetry and possibilities for lessons.

 

 

Autumn Themed Centers

Autumn themed centers for your classroom -- check them out.  

Ghosts Say, "Boo!" is a literacy center for primary classrooms. In this activity students will focus on 2 sounds of /o/:  ō and ōō.

There are 2 ghost work mats: 1 labeled "Ghosts," and the other labeled "Boo!" Students sort the 20 word/picture cards by matching the vowel sounds to the 2 ghosts.  This center includes a recording sheet and labels for your center folder.

Bats & Bridges Literacy Center also challenges students to work with vowel sounds; long and short /a/. Students will sort the bat word cards and fly them to the proper bridge for roosting.  A recording sheet is included, as are labels for your center folder.

This center activity is part of my thematic unit, Hanging Out with Stellaluna.  It is now available as a stand-alone product for the first time.

You get to combine 2 subjects in 1 center when you use Scrattle: Halloween Edition.  This wildly popular activity challenges your students to exercise their verbal fluency by making words out of the letters provided on candy corn pieces. Each letter has a numeric value, as in Scrabble(TM).  As your students record their words, they compute the value of each of them.

Then they challenge a friend at the center to compare their numbers.  In the process, your students will practice using >, <, and =. The winner of this word battle is the 1 with the most >s.  (Scrattle gets its name from Scrabble + battle.)

Not only does Scrattle give your students practice with ELA and math, but it comes with 3 different recording sheets: 1 using addition only, 1 requiring multiplication, and 1 employing mixed operations. Thus, you can readily differentiate your instruction. Moreover, this center is CCSS aligned. And better yet, it's FREE! Even better, there are multiple editions for several holidays and they, too, are FREE!

John Hughes, author of An Educator's Life blogspot, is hosting a Fall-Tastic Activities and Resouces linky party.  You are sure to find some great activities there.

Until next time...

It's about time, teachers, for Halloween.  For your emergent readers, my original book, What the Little Ghost Saw on Halloween, is available on TPT and TN.  

The simple text is predictable, following this pattern:

He saw a/an [adjective] [Halloween object supported by the picture]. 

The last page breaks the pattern, allowing the teacher to determine if the student is attending to the text or reciting a memorized pattern. 

High frequency words include he, saw, a/an, his, it, & was. Because the last page has was in the same position as saw on the previous pages, this book is useful for addressing saw/was confusions.  Do this by drawing the student's attention to the first letter of was on that last page. Without confirming whether the child read the word correctly or not, ask her what sound that letter makes.  Assuming she replies correctly, ask her if that is what she would expect to see at the beginning of was.  By drawing her attention to this detail of the text, you are giving her the ability to self-check.

The book is offered in black and white line art.  I encourage you to let your students color the pictures, especially the pages that employ the color words.  

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STILL MORE Centers for Your Classroom

Have you tried using critical thinking centers in your classroom?  If not, you really should.  Following are some of my students' favorites:

The thing I love the most about Triads, is that I can practically see the cogs turning in my students' brains.  My kiddos clamor for these brain exercises.  But, be forewarned! If you require a quiet, calm demeanor in your students, don't bring out Triads.  The enthusiasm they generate simply can't be contained.

Here's how they work: Show your students a Triads card, explaining that 1 word that can be added to each of the triad words to make a well-known phrase or compound word. The common word may be added before or after the triad words.  Did you figure out the example given here?  The common word is card; birthday card, credit card, and cardboard.  

My students love Triads so much that I have created literally hundreds of these little gems.  You can peruse the ones I've published by going here.

I know it's corny, but I just can't help myself. . . You will get a lot of bang for your buck with $1 Words.  This activity combines ELA and math with critical thinking and problem solving.  Moreover, your students will:

• conduct research (old fashioned or internet)
• work with parts of speech, prefixes and suffixes, vocabulary, and grammar 
• compute money values (manually or with calculators)
• hone editing and spelling skills
• learn study skills
• and so much more

My $1 Words units are much more "kid friendly" than most $1 Word studies in that they provide clues for students to solve.  

Run this as a competition between classes and you will find that you need 100s of clues!  My enrichment students can't get enough. Even better, the 1st unit in this series is FREE!

Square Puzzlers may just be the ideal center because even fast finishers can't finish them quickly. These gems require patience, perseverence, and problem solving; attributes we would like all of our students to develop.

The challenge with these puzzles is to reconstruct the square so that all of the images match on every interior side. This is the 2x2 square (reassembled) that is intended for the youngest students. 3x3 and 4x4 squares are included for exponentially more challenging puzzles for older students.

Want more critical thinking center ideas?  Check out the resources on my collaborative Pinterest board, It's About Time for Critical Thinking.  If you would like to join as a collaborator, we'd love to have you!

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