Second week of school finished, and still huge amounts to organise. I think the beginning of the school year is a bit like childbirth - your brain blocks out just how difficult it is, so you'll eventually do it all over again!

I have managed to finish all of the Magic E flashcards, though - which you'll need soon, if you are following North Lanarkshire's Stage 2 programme. If not, hopefully they will be useful some time later in the year.

In Magic E words, the vowel makes it 'long' sound, or it 'says its name'. We all know this, and it often seems fairly straightforward to teach. As I've been listening to my new class sound out words, read their books, and write down a bit about their summer for me, I've realised that a few of my kiddos keep forgetting that vowels can say their names in words, and not just make their vowel sound.

If children don't realise that A can make both the short a (cat) and long a (cake) sounds (we won't even get into the other sounds that it can make!), it must all be quite confusing. And it's no wonder some kids can find it difficult to retain these phonemes.

So - a few of us will be doing a bit of work on 'A, E, I, O, U' next week. Here's a great video I used a lot with my P1s at the beginning of last year. They loved it, and it reinforced the vowel names, so when we came across words with long vowel sounds, they weren't as confusing.

Being able to retell stories is such a basic skill - but one that many of our kiddos struggle with. So that is the first reading strategy we are focusing on this year as a class - developing our ability to re-tell the main points of what we have just read.

So - as I was doing my planning, I'm having all of my groups do re-tells on Story Maps this week. BUT - I have 3 groups and 2 individuals...as I was planning, I realised that I needed 5 different story maps, because the books all have different numbers of main events.

It's fairly easy to find the standard 3-5 box story maps, but I really needed up to 8 boxes for one of my groups. In years past, I've just drawn a new Story Map when I needed it for a group. But I'm being more structured with how I teach Reading Comprehension strategies, and we are all going to be working on the same strategy, at our own levels, at the same time this year. That way, our class read alouds can also be used to reinforce whichever strategy we are currently working on.

But that would mean drawing out 5 different Story Maps this week - and then doing it again (because I'll inevitably lose the ones I've drawn - organisation isn't a strong point) in subsequent weeks. So I decided it would be easiest (in the long run, you understand) to create electronic copies.

I can't be the only one who needs Story Maps on a regular basis, so I thought I'd share them here (or you can click on the picture above). 

Hope your weekly planning is going well. The boys in our family have gone down to Knockhill for racing all day today (and they are off again tomorrow), so the girls just put in an order for pizza and we're going to watch a movie together. The rest of my planning will have to wait!

You can see the general pattern of the easiest (3 box) story map on the front cover of the pack above. Here are a couple more screenshots from the pack, so you have an idea of what you would be getting before you download anything (I know we often download things we end up not really wanting when we see them!). They aren't anything fancy, but they're all in one place and they'll do the trick!

I am slowly working my way through a very long 'To Do' list. At my school, we have agreed to start sending out homework next week, so finishing my literacy (spelling words & phonemes) homework sheets was a priority.

Not the most fun way to spend a Friday evening, but a great feeling now that it is finished and printed out!

Unfortunately, my husband and I haven't found the time for an 'In Design' desktop publishing tutorial yet, so this isn't in booklet form. Maybe next August! However, I've updated the look of the pages a bit, and it worked fine last year to send it home as a packet that was just stapled in the corner. The first picture below is the packet all stapled together, with a covering letter to parents on the front. In the second picture, you can see what it looks like inside. There are 4 pages of Spelling ideas and 4 pages of Phoneme ideas (most are the same, it has to be said!). I copy them back to back, so I'm only sending home 5 pages all together (including the cover letter to parents).

I love having my class choose their own task, along with their parents. As a parent myself, I know how stressful it is when you have 3 different activities on, and your child has been assigned the most time-consuming spelling or phonics task possible - to be completed and handed in the next day! Using this packet, families can choose what they'd like or what they have time to do.

In my covering letter, I do highlight the task I often find has the most impact on pupils remembering how to spell words - 'Tricky Words'. This task asks them to tell me whether their words are 'easy' (can sound them out in a straightforward way - like 'cat') or tricky. If they are tricky, they need to tell me what makes them tricky (in the word 'again', you don't hear the 'a', for example). We always do this in class as well - talk about what makes a word harder to spell & what special things we need to remember about different words to help us. It does seem to help quite a bit more than copying out the word 3-4 times. Children can copy their word without thinking - but this particular tasks asks them to engage a bit more with how a word is spelled.

If you think this would be helpful, you can get the packet here or by clicking on the cover picture at the top of the post. Sample page from the pack below (including the 'Tricky Word' task):

The next set of Wall Words/flashcards are ready. AW is first introduced in Week 10, if you are following North Lanarkshire's Stage 2 phoneme programme. It is reviewed during Week 1 of NL Stage 3 - so if you are teaching Primary 3 this year, you'll need these right away.

When you open the file, don't worry if the font looks unclear. It doesn't look great on my copy of the PDF file either, but when you print it out, the lettering looks clear and crisp. I think there must be something a bit odd about the way that the font I've used is interacting with the display aspect of Acrobat. But the new fonts I've been trying out on the cover pages are so cute (much better than Comic Sans!), I think it's worth it, since everything prints out OK.

All of the flashcards I've made use the same font, so if you choose to use them, they will all coordinate.

Please let me know if you have any problems, and as always, feel free to send other teacher friends along to the site, if you think they might be able to use these flashcards in their own classes.

The images to the left will be familiar to anyone working with North Lanarkshire's Active Literacy programme, I'm sure (although the book covers have changed).

Having taught Primary 1 for the last couple of years, I have Active Literacy Stage 1 resources covered. However, since I'm moving to Primary 3 next year, I'll need resources for Active Literacy Stages 2 and 3 - which is a lot of resource creation!

When I'm teaching a new phoneme, I like to have flashcards with that week's phoneme that the kids can read as a class as part of our introductory mini-lesson on that phoneme. These flashcards then go up on our 'Phoneme Word Wall', as a permanent reference resource. I give the class different activities based on that week's 'Wall Words' to reinforce phoneme learning throughout the week - so I get a lot of mileage out of these flashcards.

Because I use them so much, I want the flashcards to look good and to be appealing to the kids. I also want to make sure they are accessible to ALL of the children in the class, so I find pictures to go with each word (there are a few exceptions - I haven't found pictures for words like 'have' and 'live', I'm afraid). Once I have all of the flashcards done for the Phoneme Wall, I'm planning to turn the wall words into 'bean bag' cards for our bean bag game (which I'll hopefully tweak a bit for the older children, to make it a bit more challenging...that's still a job for the future, though).

I'm currently making the flashcards for Week 30 of Stage 3 - it's such a good feeling to know that once they are all made, printed out, laminated and cut out (OK - so there is quite a bit of work still to be done!), my phoneme programme will be good to go for the year. That should free up quite a few Sunday hours throughout the school year! After Stage 3 is finished, I'll move back to Stage 2.

My technical consultant (my husband!) is home from Africa, so hopefully he'll be able to help me convert all of my files so that I can post them on-line for others to use. Under the terms of use for much of the clipart I'm using for the pictures, all files must be 'flattened', so that the clipart can't be easily extracted. Please do keep checking back, though, as I'm hoping to start getting files up in the next week or so...