Back to school is hectic! I've been trying to get all of the North Lanarkshire Stage 2 phonemes printed off at work (3 different teachers need them, either because we are teaching Stage 2 phonemes to our classes for the first time, or because we are reviewing Stage 2 phonemes before moving on) - and I realised I hadn't finished Week 3 review phonemes - such a bummer, when you think you've finished them!

These Week 3 phonemes are first taught at the end of Stage 1 - so if you are teaching Primary 1, bookmark this page, so you can come back in the Spring! But for those of you who will be reviewing these phonemes shortly, here are the OY, OA and QU picture flashcards. AI is also reviewed during Week 3, but those flashcards have been posted together with the AY cards (I thought it made sense to put the long A sounds together). Apologies for the strange combination of sounds in a single file, but I wanted to get them done as quickly as possible.

I've promised my daughters we'll watch a quick episode of Parks & Recreation, so I'm off - hope these are useful! And please keep checking back - I know I have a few more Stage 2 phonemes to finish off., and I'll hopefully be getting to those very soon.

The next 2 sets of Wall Words/flashcards are finished and ready for anyone to download and use - this file contains TH and NG flashcards. I hope you find them useful! In most of these sets, I've tried to find at least 12 age-appropriate words containing the target phoneme. I've also tried to divide them into 6 easier and 6 trickier words (in the file, I've arranged the words in order...roughly...from easiest to hardest). In the NG set, you'll find 4 verbs with the 'ing' ending - teaching verb endings is a great way to quickly expand decoding skills (kids get such a boost when they can read 'long words' like 'sitting' easily!).

I use these cards to introduce a new phoneme on Monday - we read the flashcards together as a class, and then I always have plenty of volunteers to help me transfer the word cards onto our 'Word Wall'. As you can see in the picture below (it's a screenshot of a page from the file you'll download), I always have a 'Phoneme (dipthong for American readers) Card' that gives the phoneme and a picture hint. All of the word cards are then posted under/around the Phoneme Card (depending on how crowded my wall is, and how many word cards I want to put up).

These cards then stay up all week (and beyond), for children to use as a resource for various phoneme-related tasks they are given throughout the week. I like to leave at least some of the cards up over the longer term - children need lots of repetition/reminders before some of the trickier phonemes move into long-term memory. Depending on your own wall space, and display policies at your school, you can chose to leave all or only a few word cards up, or you can transfer the Phoneme Card onto a 'Phoneme Pocket' (also attached to the wall) and put all of the word cards into the pocket - that way children can go and get them when/if they need them, but it takes up much less space than displaying everything.

Below, you can see all of the TH flashcards. 'This' and 'that' are difficult words to match with pictures - but so important for our kids to know to facilitate fluent reading and writing. The NG words are laid out similarly. 

Please try them out and let me know what you think! And if you have any teacher friends who would find these useful, please send them over to my blog as well. :-)

I'll be adding more Wall Words as I get them converted into PDFs - why not bookmark or favourite this site, so you can get back easily to check what's available?

This past year, my goal was to revamp my numeracy teaching - so I've added lots of games, maths rotations and small group teaching.

Although literacy has been rolling along relatively well, I've wanted to include more literacy-based games into our reading and spelling time. It's been more of a challenge (and I definitely think that it is sensible to tackle one change at a time in a classroom!), but here is a game my kids really enjoy.

Played in groups of 2 or 3, the kids put word cards inside a hula hoop (pictured). This picture is from the week we worked on the 'ai' phoneme. They then take turns tossing a bean bag onto the cards. Whichever card your bean bag lands on, you have to spell the word on your white board (one of the other kids holds the card and checks for correct spelling). If you spell it correctly, you win the card. If not it goes back into the hula hoop and play passes to the next person.

Since introducing this game, I've never seen kids more eager to practice their spelling words. Some of the kids will even pull this game out during 'choosing time' - our 10 minutes at the end of the day when everyone can choose something fun to do with their friends in the classroom. This is great for your kinaesthetic learners!

For anyone interested in trying this with your own class, here is a link to the 'ai' cards we use for this game. If you are working with North Lanarkshire's active literacy programme, this game would be good for beginning of the year Primary 2 classes, when they review the ai phoneme, and end of the year Primary 1, when kids are introduced to the ai phoneme for the first time.

Oh dear - not the neatest or most organised of class libraries, is it? It looks better now - but only because I've started to pack books away to move them to my new classroom next week.

Classroom libraries are huge in the States - but not so prominent here in the UK, I've found. But what an incredible resource for kids in our class - a classroom library full of books, at their reading and interest levels, which they can choose for themselves.

I'm slowly learning the importance of being selective in class libraries - too many books (see above picture) can be overwhelming. And it can be hard for kids to pick books at the appropriate level for them. So - one of my summer goals is to choose a range of books appropriate for my incoming P3s in August, and have them organised and displayed clearly so that children can easily see what's there and choose what they want to read.

Here's the AR bookfinder website that levels books by LEXILE and ATOS book levels. I know many in Scotland use coloured bookbands, so if you click here, you will be able to download a document that matches lexile levels with our book bands (my husband really didn't 'get' why I was so excited when I found this!).

My library related tasks for this summer:
1) Buy matching book baskets/boxes
2) Choose books suitable for all levels of readers in my class
3) Use the bookfinder website & book band converter to book band the books in my class library (might see if I can bribe a couple of children to help with this one!).
3) Organise the chosen books, so that some are grouped by author (Magic Treehouse books, Junie B. Jones, Horrid Henry, etc) while others are grouped by book band level.
4) (If there is time when all of that is done - ha!) label books grouped by author according to their bookband level as well - just to make choices a bit easier for kids.

I'll let you know how I get on!

Do you have a classroom library? Is it filled with school books, or with your own books? How do you organise them? And most importantly - how and when are kids able to choose their own books from the class library?

This year, I used 'ball words' from Differentiated Kindergarten in my class for the first time - they were fabulous! As I type, more than two thirds of my class have learned all 220 early sight words (Dolch words) - and they've done it all independently. You can see in the pictures how I store my ball words. I'll write more about these later, but if you are curious, please click on the links for a fuller explanation.

As I was listening to kiddos who are still working to master their ball words today, though, I was thinking about how we help kids develop word attack skills. My son is dyslexic, so this is an area of the curriculum that I've thought and read a lot about.

In our school, we use North Lanarkshire's Active Literacy programme, which emphasises the ability to break words down into their sounds/phonemes and 'sound words out'. Which is all well and good - but what about trickier words? And things that don't seem to follow the rules we teach our kids? And how do we help those kids who need a bit more time and more support to remember the sounds that different phonemes make?

For me, two keys have been:
1) repetition, repetition, repetition and
2) giving kids as much information as possible about the words they are reading.

When kids are practicing their sight words and get stuck, I prompt for what the phoneme says, and if possible, I link my question to words they already know (for example, every time we get stuck with 'ay', I point to the 'day of the week' up on our white board. That's usually enough to remind them that 'ay' makes the long 'a' sound, and they can figure out the word). Some kids remember phonemes very quickly. Other kids need lots of repetition before it 'sticks'.

But I also try to give them as much information about a word as I can, so that things that seem crazy 'make sense'. 'C' making an 's' sound, and 'g' saying 'j' are cases in point. When does this happen? When 'c' and 'g' are followed by 'i, e or y' (there are always exceptions, but luckily, primary 1s don't tend to pick up on them!). Now - they don't usually remember this when they are spelling the words (nise, anyone?), but when they are reading, these words don't confuse them. There is a rule that helps them make sense of it. And I've repeated that rule so often, it's stuck in the back of their memory somewhere, ready to be dragged out with a prompt or two.  

The more information we can give our kids to take the 'mystery' out of reading, the better. This year, we've also spent a lot of time talking about vowels and just what tricky little letters they are...if we sound out a word and it doesn't make sense, chances are, that vowel (or two) isn't playing by the rules and is making a different sound. There isn't always a rule for that one - but at least we know which letters we have to keep an eye on.

Here's a picture of the first three 'ball word' sets, to give you an idea of how they are put together. I have 4-5 sets of each ball word, so there isn't an issue if several kids are working on the same list of words.