Sunday, December 7, 2014

Rhyming Picture Sort Center--Response to Intervention Activity

Hello Fellow Teachers,

I hope your year is going well and you are finding time to enjoy the holiday season. I am not one of those amazing people who have their Christmas shopping done by Thanksgiving, so I am finding time here and there to shop. Although my outside lights and decorations have been out since last week, we have not gotten our Christmas tree up yet. But today is the day!

Before I head out, I wanted to hurry up and post. My blog posts are few and far between. Mostly because of the business of teaching. Although I don't have my own classroom anymore, my RTI position keeps me pretty busy.

Lately I have been exploring all of the RTI resources on the internet. My search is in the early stages, but I have found some valuable websites. For example, did you know that the Dibels benchmark assessments and progress monitoring tools are all FREE on the dibels website? You can find them here: https://dibels.uoregon.edu/. Another fantastic website is http://www.easycbm.com/.

There are many phonological assessments available on the internet. Some good testing resources can be found here PAST test, and PAST answer sheet. For more resources, Jen Jones at Hello Literacy has a wonderful blog post:Hello Literacy RTI Assessments.

Anyway, I just used the PAST test on a few students who are struggling to find out where their holes were in their phonological awareness knowledge and both had an issue with rhyming. I wanted some quick rhyming activities, and while I had rhyming cut and paste picture sorts (Sample), I wanted a center that I could hand to a student to complete more quickly than cut and paste. I also think my rhyming cut and past picture sorts may be too difficult when first teaching rhyming because they contain a lot of voiced vs. unvoiced sorts, and really, I need two distinct rimes for these students to start with and then maybe reinforce the skill with the cut and paste rhyming sorts later.

So I created these easier Rhyming Picture Sort Centers that start out easy and then have a few difficult ones at the end.

You can obtain a sample center here: Free Rhyming Picture Sort Center

If you are interested in all of the centers, you can find the set of 13 here:

Rhyming Picture Sort Centers

Thanks for stopping by. Hopefully I will blog again soon ;)

Anna

Thursday, April 4, 2013

CVC Cut and Paste Picture Sorting

Spring Break can be productive and fun. In between the fun, I have created some cut and paste activities that compare and contrast short vowel, CVC words.

I love students practicing cutting and pasting. I firmly believe kids should practice this fine motor skill EVERY day in kindergarten. Building fine motor skills is vital in promoting fluency in writing. Similarly, I believe a lot more handwriting instruction should happen in kindergarten than seems to be happening. Classes that I have taught handwriting a lot during the first half of the year have come so much farther in their writing CONTENT. This is because getting students fluent in the physical act of writing frees up important brain space and enables them to concentrate on what they are writing. So I love every opportunity to develop fine motor skills. I believe they are a VITAL part of balanced literacy that is sometimes overlooked. That is why I spent time developing these cut and paste activities.

But I am a stickler for efficiency, so not only can kids practice their fine motor skills and phonemic awareness, but they can also practice their phonics skills with these cut and paste activities.

Below is a free sample file of the cut and paste book comparing and contrasting short and and short i: