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It's hard to believe that schools starts here in the next couple weeks. We've been working this summer on making some updates to our TpT Store and for this week only…you can download our Basic Code Fluency Builders for FREE! If you have purchased these in the past, you'll notice the fonts have been jazzed up a bit (sorry, no more Comic Sans!)

 
We have also created additional resources to help your kiddos.

If you download them, please leave us some love and tell us what you think!

Reading Detectives

It never seems to fail that I forget my laptop when I come up with reading ideas for my kids. Translation: My school computer has a horrific font selection to choose from! 

I should be embarrassed to post this, but since I didn't use Times New Roman, I'll let it slide...

My kindergarten reading groups are coming right along...I have been extremely proud of the progress they've made since the beginning of the school year! Monster proud. Lately, they have been sounding out every single sound in a word even if they can automatically read the word. I've tried everything I can to get them to just read the word if they know it...including standing on the table as "Captain Read the Word".

So, we decided to become word detective readers! I placed 20 basic code words (with numbers) around my classroom (pink words were ones I knew they'd be able to read easily and purple words were ones that might present more of a challenge).

And each student was given a "Detective Reading Tracker" sheet (below) in which they drew pictures to indicate the word that was read. (Clearly, #4 is a crab!)

I told the kids if they sounded the words out, other detectives in the room would hear them! In order to complete their "reading mission" they had to read every word on their own! And they did.

I've attached a copy of the Word Doc I created to do this with them...feel free to use and change the words so they are appropriate for your kiddos! (If you jazz it up with better fonts, please share!)

Tricky Words

I am pretty excited to report that my first grade reading groups are making tremendous progress this year. We've spent the past month learning how to say the sounds in words and being able to put those sounds back together! A few days ago they started to realize that some words are trying to "trick" us! We stumbled across the word "away" and it didn't sound right! 

I created two posters (below) in which we've been adding, "Words We Can Sound Out" and "Words We Know by Sight". (Please excuse the font selection on these posters, as I was in a hurry and don't have much to select from on my computer at school!) I spent some time talking to them about how those "tricky" words are going to be the focus of the rest of first grade and that I'd teach them tricks to figure out those words. Every time we come across a new word, they get pretty excited to write it on a Post-It...

Today I wanted to see how they did when we talked about these tricky words a little bit further. I read aloud to them, "The Two Greedy Bears" by Mirra Ginsburg...Which happens to be one of my favorites! I told them there was a "fancy" word in the story that we were going to figure out the meaning. (The word was 'sly').

If you haven't read this story before, two bears argue over how to divide their food into equal parts. A fox comes along and purposely divides the food so that one piece is bigger than the other. In order to make the pieces equal, she takes an unequal bite...until two small tiny pieces are left.

The kids realize that the fox was trying to trick the two bears...she was being sly!

I told my kiddos that many times words we come across are sly. We can't always say each sound in a word...someone decided to make reading tricky!

We took a Post-It off of one of our charts and tried to determine if each letter was saying their sound. If they did say their correct sounds (like in frog /f/ /r/ /o/ /g/) then it is NOT a sly word. If they didn't say their correct sounds like in my, then the word is sly and we determined the letter or letters that were making it tricky.

Next week we will be generating a list of words that contain the sound /oe/ as in home. My goal for them next week is to see that there are many different ways to represent that sound. (If you'd like to see more on how I teach this, head on over to ReadingResource.net!) I will be posting our progress over the next few months!

The first quarter is almost complete and I couldn't be more proud of my first grade groups!