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Today we got outside for a little sight word fun! I wanted to incorporate some movement and play into our sight word practice, and this morning we had a few hours of nice spring weather. I knew we had to get outside and take advantage of it before the rain this afternoon, so we mixed some literacy practice into our outdoor play with Sight Word Hopscotch!
My 6 year old has been a car lover since he was a baby, pointing to cars and trucks that drove by during our stroller walks years ago. As such, we have accumulated a LOT of cars in our toy bins. When he was just a toddler, I started making him roads, parking lots, and little towns on cardboard and he LOVED them!
My son at 2 years old matching numbers on cars to numbers in the parking spots.
When he was 2 years old and showing some interest in learning letters and numbers, I started incorporating some academic learning into these creations. We started by labeling parking spots with numbers and creating corresponding numbered cars. I labeled the cars by adding a small strip of tape on top of them and writing numbers with a permanent marker. He would play for hours with his cars, matching the numbers on the cars to the corresponding parking spots in his town. It was a HIT!
Our town has expanded!! Here my little guy is 4 years old and playing with his town, where he matched his cars to the numbers in the parking lot.
Now that he’s 6 and in kindergarten, I wanted to take this concept and modify it to help him learn color words. Today, we made a little town on craft paper with a couple of stores (I let him choose - and he picked a toy store and Costco ;)) - it’s a good way to pretend to get out and live a normal life amidst this coronavirus quarantining we’ve been doing! For each place in our town, we added a parking lot and labeled each spot with color words that matched his toy cars.
I drew the town for him and labeled most of the parking spaces, with his input. I wanted him to have some practicing writing the color words, too, so I saved a few spaces for him and he got to work writing them out. He was SO excited to have this new town to play with - it’s been quite awhile since we’ve made one of these.
The completed color words parking lot!
After we completed our parking lot, we got to work - PLAYING! Is there any better way to learn than to incorporate play? Our answer is NO - playing is the BEST WAY TO LEARN! When learning is fun, children (and adults!) are more likely to retain the information and make those critical connections in their brains. We had fun parking our cars in the parking spots while imagining scenarios where we visit each of the locations in our town.
If you are working color words, this is the perfect vehicle (see what I did there? ;)) to incorporate some play into your learning! You can easily modify this activity for learners who need more support by writing each word with the matching color. We love to use Mr. Sketch Markers because the scents add a bit of extra fun to our projects!
This activity can be adapted to match a number of different learning objectives - just add some tape to the top of your cars and label them. Here are some of my ideas:
Matching upper- to lowercase letters
Matching numerals to dots or number words
Matching addition/subtraction problems to numerals or dots
Matching letters to pictures with that beginning sound
Matching short vowel words to pictures
Matching digraphs to pictures
Matching sight words
I hope you try this out with your little ones at home. If you do, please comment and let me know how it went and what you worked on!
Keep Reading!
Jill
*this post contains affiliate links
Poetry is one of my favorite vehicles for teaching literacy in the primary grades. There are so many fun ways to use a poem, and the shortened format makes it more accessible to our youngest readers. Poetry can be used to improve:
Reading fluency through repeated readings
Reading expression
Sight word vocabulary
Phonological awareness
Word study skills
And much more!
Today, I’m going to talk about using poetry to teach word study. In many cases, like this one, it was such a natural next step!
We started today’s lesson with some echo reading (I read a line or two, and my 6 year old son, Hudson, repeated me, while following along with the text). Once we got through the text a couple of times, he read it himself a few times to practice reading fluently and with good expression. We also added in some fun movements - because moving is always more fun!! I encourage you to add movement into reading instruction whenever possible.
After reading, we moved onto some word study. I had initially planned to do word study later in the day, after he read his guided reading book, but this poem was the perfect segue into learning about the -ay word family, so we changed our plans.
Poetry as a vehicle for word study
We started by finding all of the rhyming words in the poem. Hudson circled them, and then we identified the spelling pattern together (-ay). We then took out our handy magnetic letter set and got to work creating more -ay family words on our magnetic dry erase board. I love magnetic letters for word study! They add a bit of extra fun to the activity as kids get to move them around and manipulate them. Hudson finished the word study practice by writing his words and a sentence using the words in his word study journal.
I hope you can join in on the poetry fun! For more engaging poems like the one shared above, you can purchase the book Perfect Poems: With Strategies for Teaching Fluency (Grades 1-2).
Happy Reading!
*product links above are Amazon affiliate links. I only share products that I really have and love!
