sight word and word building

Since we have a short week, we are not doing star of the week or focusing on a letter of the week this week, but we do still have a word of the week, which is "my." We made the "my" word with die cut letters today and practiced the "my" song to remember how to spell the word. The songs goes like this:

(to the tune of camp town races)

You can spell my if you try

m-y, m-y

first an m and then a y

my my my my

We have completed our first 30 Fast Track Phonics lessons, so I will now be introducing some new activities to help the children practice their letter sounds as well as building and writing words.

Today we used word building cards for the first time. Each child received an envelope containing 5 letters.  I started by asking them to make the word "at" and then we made additional words by changing the sounds around and adding letters. We made the words at, an, and, Dan, tan, ant, sat, sad, sand, and finally stand.

Each list of words contains a "mystery word" that uses all of the letters in the envelope. For today, that mystery word was stand. I didn't tell the class what word to make, but instead asked them to try and figure out what word used all of our letters. They did a great job and worked hard to  break down the words I was saying in order to find the letters they needed to use in order to spell it. This is a great activity to build spelling skills and to reinforce the process the children need to go through when they are thinking about how to write a word and what sounds they hear.

The hallway is looking beautiful with all of the unique turkeys we have. They look great! We have also collected quite a bit of toilet paper for the hygiene drive, which is wonderful! I am not sure if we should really be expecting snow or not, but it sure has gotten cold out! Stay warm! Our district website posts information about school delays and closures just in case we do actually get some bad weather. There is also instructions on the site that allow you to get notified via email if there is a school closure or delay, which makes it really easy to get the news.