Phonemic Segmentation Cards

Wow it's been a busy school year thus far! I hope you all are off to a great start. I have been so thankful and impressed by the power of Pinterest, other teacher blogs, and Teachers Pay Teachers. We have worked so hard, and our 2nd grade hallway looks absolutely fabulous thanks a bunch to ideas found on Pinterest! 

Oh the Places You'll Go - Goal Writing

Back to School Student Glyphs

Best Part of Me Writing

All About Me Pennants

In Our Classroom Poster - Class Rules

In other news, I've created a new TpT product: Phonemic Segmentation Cards. Almost all of my products come from a need/necessity in my own classroom, so the coolest thing is that every product has been kid tested and teacher approved! These cards were developed for use in my guided reading groups, but you could really use them any time.  This is the first year in a loooong time that I've had such a high group of emergent readers in 2nd grade, so I feel like I've been learning a LOT about pre-emergent and emergent readers - something I haven't really dealt with in quite a while, even when I was looping and teaching 1st grade also! I enjoy learning, so that's a plus. :-) I feel like Jan Richardson (the author), my kindergarten teacher friends, and the title I reading teacher have kind of been my go to gurus this year! Thank goodness for these awesome ladies! 

Anyway, my sweet little pre-emergent/emergent readers are struggling to segment words, so that is why I created these cards. Students can use these to practice phonemic segmentation. The dots underneath each sound are provided to guide students to put their finger and touch and say each sound. After saying each sound, students will then blend the sounds together to read the word. These cards are designed to help students practice 1:1 correspondence with segmenting sounds. These cards can be used in a variety of ways: parent volunteers, guided reading, literacy centers, flashcards, etc... I copied these cards, laminated, and put them on a ring to have my students work on segmenting during guided reading. Please let me know if you have any questions! Hope these cards are helpful for your students who are working on sounds during guided reading or any other time!

To download these cards, click HERE or click the picture below:

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Informational Text Feature Poster Pack Sale

Yay for Friday! As much as we love our classes and are quite invested in our students' progress, even teachers need some time off. ;-) Hope you've all got something wonderful planned for the weekend!

 

My Informational Text Feature Poster Pack is on sale for the weekend over at TpT! We will be teaching informational text features in a couple weeks for Instructional Focus, and I've finally finished my poster pack. I plan on printing, laminating, and displaying these posters that have a description and picture for each text feature. We've never taught text features explicitly for Instructional Focus, and I'm really excited to do so. I think this will be a great unit for the kiddos, especially since our students are expected to read informational text 50% of the time now. What great strategies for gleaning information from non-fiction informational text!

 

To download, click HERE for a reduced price over the weekend, or click the picture below. Hope you have a fabulous weekend!!!

 

 

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Fluency Mini-Cards for Guided Reading (or anytime)

Fluency is so important for readers to learn and practice. Fluency is one of the many keys to comprehension. A student should be able to read with meaning, and being fluent aids that. I created these mini-cards to use during guided reading, but of course they could be used anytime. They are just little reminders of what it means to read fluently. We've discussed with our students many times, but these will maybe just be that extra support they need to remember what to focus on. Reading for fluency gives our students some purpose to rereads, and while there are obviously other reasons to reread a story, students want to know that what they are doing is relevant and purposeful. Click the picture to download or go to my TpT store to download for free! :-) Enjoy! To use, just copy on card stock, laminate, and cut apart!

 or download from TpT HERE

 

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Making Tracks

Were anyone else's kiddos sugared up from the V-Day parties yesterday??? Class parties in the middle of the week should be outlawed. ;-) Anyway, I hope everyone had a great V-Day. The hubby was so sweet and actually made dinner for me last night (a very welcome present I assure you). He even set the dining room table and put out our wedding china. Steak, green beans, baked potato, and homemade cheese garlic bread for dinner and a yellow cake from a box for dessert. It was the cutest thing!

Anyway, one of the bright points of today was shared reading. I love teaching children how to make tracks and show their thinking as they read. We've been doing lots of modeling throughout the school year with making tracks, and we'd done a couple introductory lessons; however, we hadn't quite gotten as far as having the kids try writing their thoughts out yet. Today, as we were reading our shared reading story, At Home Around the World, the students got to share some of their thoughts and tracks (this is a nonfiction informational text about different kinds of homes around the world).

As we started to read the story, the kiddos had so many tracks that they were sharing aloud, that I decided to let them try writing them out. We'd made our anchor chart in a previous lesson and I had it up front for students to reference. I was curious how my students would do with writing out their tracks, and I was pretty impressed for their first time! The students loved this activity, and even though this was their first time recording their tracks, there was definitely significant pre-teaching involved in the week before through mini-lessons, creating an anchor chart, making connections, and heavy modeling. Here is our anchor chart. I found myself wishing I'd taken a picture of the one I'd made with my class last year, but alas, I didn't, and I couldn't remember exactly what I'd included, but this seemed to suffice.

While the students were reading, they then made tracks on post-it notes (do you love that I just happened to have house shaped post-is that went perfectly with the story???). Then, instead of having the kids stick their tracks in their books, we put them all up on chart paper so we could read over them together when we were done. I had the students put the page number of the page that "inspired" them, write their track, and put their initials - as you can see, most of them did that, but there were  few that "modified" the directions, haha. ;-)

The students were so enthusiastic about sharing their thoughts, and it was super cute to read aloud their tracks. Like I said, I was pretty impressed at the quality of the majority of the tracks, especially as this was their first time independently doing this for the year! As you can see from the writing, I've got quite the range of students in my class.... ;-)

Some of the tracks above: "I learned that some people's houses are made of snow." "This reminds me of my home." "I saw a wide house." "I didn't know that people can stay warm in an igloo."

"I didn't know that houses have wheels on them." "I know that houses go underground." "I didn't know that people can live in igloos.

"I made a tipi in school." "I wonder if they're cold."

As is the case every year, this was a great lesson to help the students "dig deeper"and really think about the text they were reading. I love that all of my students, including my ELL kids were able to share their thoughts through words and pictures and be proactive in their reading!

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