100 Days of School

This week, we celebrated the 100th day of school. Since I have a resource room, I don't have a lot of time to do extra things due to my crazy schedule. But I am so glad I made time to do this super fun activity with my students.

We started off discussing what we will look like and act like when we are 100 years old. I took pictures of my students and used the app Aging Booth to "time travel" to our picture when we were 100 years old.

My kids were laughing so hard at these pictures.

We talked about what our lives would be like when we were 100 years old and what kind of person we thought we would be. Fall Into First has a great writing activity that we did. I gave my students the same writing template to help them make grammatically correct sentences (a huge project in my room).

This is probably my favorite bulletin board of the whole year.

We've been working really hard on reading what we write and fluency. To help tie this project into this two objectives, I used another app on Day 2 called ChatterPix.

With ChatterPix, you can upload any photo and record voice to it. By drawing a simple line on the photo, you make a "mouth" that speaks your recording.

On ChatterPix, you can only record 30 seconds of video. This was super great for me, because my students need to practice their fluency. We did a practice run reading our writing while I timed with my stopwatch timer on my phone. I wouldn't let students attempt recording until they could read their writing in less than 30 seconds. 

Here's one of my favorite videos that totally cracked me up!

After we made our videos, we uploaded them to our online portfolios at SeeSaw.

My parents always leave the sweetest comments to our SeeSaw uploads.

This 100 Day of School activity will be a favorite every year now! It was totally worth the effort, and we have laughed so much the last two days.

Helping B and D Reversals (freebie included)

B and D reversals are something I see often in my students reading and writing. 

I've posted before {here} about some of the errors that I often see in struggling readers and how I correct the errors while reading {here}.

Today, I'm sharing with you some of the activities that I use to help students practice differentiating between the letters B and D. Sometimes it seems like my students really just need so much practice and lots of visual cues to help them out. 

I like to give my students consistency with how I describe the formation of B and D. I always use the sayings "bat before the ball" for B and "doughnut on a stick" for D. This helps my students remember what part of the letter they need to form first.

I keep some of these types of activities handy all the time. I can easily pull them out whenever we have a few extra minutes or if I just think my students need some more discrimination practice between the two letters.

 You can check these activities out by clicking on the picture below or {here}.

One of my students favorite games is this B and D Zap! game that's a freebie in my store.

We play this game as a "speed" game. I set my timer for 3 minutes and students must quickly say the correct letter to keep a card. We try to do as many as we can in 3 minutes. There are special cards that students can pull, such as the Zap! card. The Zap! card means students must give all of their cards back to me. There is also a skip and reverse card to keep the game fun. My students love playing Zap!

You can check it out by clicking on the picture below or {here}.

 I hope this gives you some helpful ideas for your students!

How I'm Supplementing Reading Wonders Unit 3

Now that we're back from Christmas break, we've started Unit 3 in the 1st grade Reading Wonders series. Our district requires us to use this curriculum and expects us to follow the pacing and assessments from Reading Wonders. Even though I teach special education, I am still expected to teach grade level material and use our curriculum. Although, I do go at slower pace than my gen ed counterparts.

There are things I like about the series (such as the readers and decodables from WonderWorks), but there are areas that I feel like Reading Wonders doesn't do a great job with. The practice pages are very boring and dry, but my students really need the practice!

Here are some of the materials I will use to supplement Unit 3.

At the beginning of each unit, I pull out all of the high frequency word cards for our word wall.

I love how our Word Wall is color coordinated.  This makes it easy to tell students to look for the pink card under Oo to find the word of. When students are helping their friends find words, they know to tell them what color card they should look for.

Each word card is labeled with the Unit and Week to make for easier storage and organizing. You can check them out {here} or by clicking below.

Every morning, we start our day with Corinna from Surfin' Through Second's morning work. I love how the repetition gives my students a sense of independent but also allows them practice valuable skills.

For morning work, I use the pages that are several pages behind where we are in the series. This way I know the students have been taught the skill already, and it gives them a spiral review of previously taught skills. Here's a sample page of what my students were working on before Christmas break.

You can check out Corinna's morning work by clicking {here} or the picture below.

My students love playing games! They are so excited about playing games that they don't even care that they're learning. I've made games that go along with each phonics skills and a comprehensive unit game of the high frequency sight words taught.

I use these games during small group, with my RTI intervention groups from the gen ed classrooms, as a way to reengage students when I see them slipping, or just as a quick time filler.

My students are so excited to see what the special cards are for each game. This little guy had to find out the special cards even though they weren't cut out yet!

Every game comes with a recording sheet for students to get extra practice.

You can check out the games for Unit 3 more by clicking {here} or on the picture below.

My students need a lot of practice with the weekly Wonders skills, but I also need it to be easy for me. I created these Print It! Practice It! pages to help my students AND me! I use these with the students in my classroom and the RTI students that I see from the gen ed classrooms. 

My students will do anything to use a spinner or roll dice! When students play, I typically put them in partners. Their partner is required to listen to their friend read and double check that they correctly read the word or sentence. I keep an eye on all my partners, record errors or growth as they read to each other, and help out when students have trouble decoding words.

Putting the pages in page protectors makes it easy for me to pull them out of a binder and have an easy activity ready to go at a moments notice.

Each week includes several pages of practice for decoding the weekly phonics skill, editing sentences, and practicing the grammar skills.

These are some of the pages we will be using in upcoming weeks.

Unit 3 Week 3's phonics skills focuses on the Soft C and Soft G patterns. I love the Spin It! Read It! pages that include reading phonics patterns in a sentence. 

I've really been working hard to make sure my students understand the different phonics rules that go with each pattern. I've made a point to describe the pattern and refer to the pattern and rules during our everyday talk. I love when I hear them stating the rules to each other.

Contractions are so much more fun if they can roll a dice while they're practicing!

Adding inflectional endings are so tricky! This is just the kind of practice my students need!

You can see more of the pages included in this unit by downloading the preview file that can be found {here} or by clicking the picture below.

There you have it! All this practice should really help push my students toward mastery of the skills in Unit 3!

Encouraging Quality Student Work

Some of my students really struggle with completing acceptable, quality work. We do a lot of do-overs and erasing in my room! Since we're coming back from Christmas break, I wanted us to start off reviewing the expectations of quality work by providing some visuals to help us out.

We also filled out this reflection sheet as a way to really think about whether or work is considered quality work or not.

I'll be adding these reflection sheets to my students' individual Student Data Notebooks as a reminder of what they will need to do in order to complete quality work.

For some of my students that need a more consistent visual reminder, I taped these Quality Work strips to their desks.

If these can be useful in your classroom, you can download them {here} as a freebie.