Sight word games!

I have had a request to share some ideas on how to teach Sunny Street sight words to Senior Infants and as a result, here is a little compilation of ones I like best. I have collected some of these ideas from various places over the years and come up with some myself, so apologies if I can't give credit to whoever came up with the activities originally! There are a mixture of activities here suitable for whole class teaching, literacy center activities, group activities and pair activities.

1. Tic Tac Toe: 
Go through sight words with the class to begin with. Then, with words on a word wall in the classroom and using a pointer/feather to point to each word, chant the rhyme: 'Tic, tac, toe, here we go, where we stop, no one knows' (point to a different word for each word of the rhyme). When you land on the final word, the class call out the word they have landed on. I like to use quiet voices, loud voices, fast, slow, deep and high voices to say the rhyme to keep it interesting. You can also ask individual children to name the word after a couple of rounds as a group. Ask children to be the teacher for another variation on the game.

2. Bingo:
Make out bingo cards for the class, (having about 6 different versions so they do not all have the same card). Pull the words out of a bag and get them to place counters on the correct words to make three in a row. 

3. Hide and Go Seek:
Hide a few words in different places in the room. Get the children to find and point to the word ___. 

4. Beat the Clock Flashcard Game: 
Get them to see how many words they can name in a minute.

5. Sight Word Songs:
Heidi's Songs on Youtube has some great songs with actions to teach sight words. Great transitional activities too. 

6. Stepping Stones:
Get the children in groups to play a leap frog kind of game where they have to be able to read the word before they can jump onto the flashcard.

7. Toss the Coin:
Using the same cards you used for bingo, get them to toss a counter and when it lands on a word, they must read it. Take in turns. 

8. Pick a Card:
Get them to play pick a card using small 3 inch long word cards, with a partner or with you on a one to one level when you are hearing their reading. See who can win the most cards. If they cannot read a word, it goes back into the bunch and they can try again later. 

9. Roll the Dice:
In pairs/with teacher, have all of the flashcards upside down, roll a die and count that many cards before you turn the one you land on over and read it. If you can read it, you can keep the card. If not, place it back where it was and play again.

10. Writing Words: 
Get children to practice writing words on sand, on whiteboards, on blackboards and with the look, see, cover, write, check strategy. Play beat the clock by getting them to see how many times they can write the word in a minute. See if they can beat their own record. Make the words out of playdough.

11. I'm Thinking of a Word: 
While looking at your word wall, tell them you are thinking of a word that starts with/ends with/has the vowel _ in it/rhymes with etc. Get them to name the word and point to it.

Hope these are useful! Let me know which you like best!

Consonant Digraphs

A lot of time is spent teaching various blends and digraphs in Senior Infants once they have solidified their knowledge of basic sounds and blending. I like to begin teaching digraphs with the consonant digraphs: 'sh', 'ch', 'th' and 'wh'. I find they pick these up quicker than others, as they can name words that start with these sounds quite easily. The sounds are often more useful to them in their reading too. Also, while I find they often confuse vowel digraphs with each other, they rarely have this problem with consonant digraphs.

As I have made and found so many resources connected with these sounds, throughout my time teaching in infants and in learning support, I have compiled a list of the various activities I used with the children. Keep in mind that I did not use every activity for every sound and some were only used when all 4 sounds were covered. The activities can be combined to form a lesson or alternatively some could be used in literacy centers!

1. Jolly Phonics:
As in most schools, I used the Jolly Phonics programme to teach the sounds sh, ch and th initially. You can find the video here. I played the video on many occasions for the children while they ate their lunch. I found playing these songs and other vocabulary building songs and stories (e.g. The British Council LearnEnglishKids website) to them, calmed them down before they went outside and it also meant they were learning at a time which can sometimes be wasted learning time. Surprisingly, they did not seem to mind the repetition!

2. Other songs:
 I also used this video to show them the various words that can be made using the sounds.

I made up the following posters using screen shots from this video:

3. Trace the snake:

I put the following pictures up on the IWB and got them to only shout out the sound if we landed on the particular one we were learning, while tracing the snake pattern in the air. I varied the speeds so that it was more exciting. These are edited resources of something I found online.

  4. PowerPoint:

You can download the PowerPoints I made and used by clicking on each digraph: th sh wh ch.

5. Worksheets:
I have downloaded, created and used various worksheets where the children must either circle/cut out/colour/sort the wh, sh, th or ch words.

6. Pictures of words:
I had the children draw pictures of a word containing the sound and their pictures were put up on the wall around the sound being covered that fortnight.

7. Sorting bowls:
I had 4 colourful party bowls in the middle of the table, each labelled with a sound (sh, th, ch, wh or any other sounds you want to include). They had to sort their selection of picture cards into the bowls in the center of the table according to the sound each began with.

8. Board game:

In groups they played a board game where if they landed on a consonant digraph they had to name a word that started (or ended) with the sound. They then could roll again and take another go.

9. Bingo: 
You can download several bingo cards I made up to test the children's recognition of the sounds here. You can also play the game with words in the boxes as opposed to just the sounds.

10. Storytime:
I read the children a story containing words starting with the sound in question and they had to put their hands on their heads when they heard a word containing the sound. Prim-ed do a series of poems featuring these sounds such as Theodore Thatcher and Walter the Whale. Oxford Reading Tree and similar companies also sell books which are quite simple and dedicate each book to a particular digraph. This is also a great opportunity to use a Big Book too!







I hope some of these ideas get your creative juices flowing! Let me know if you have any other ideas for the teaching of these sounds!

Play Areas in Infant Classrooms

While I have posted about literary and maths centers in infants before, I haven't posted about play/oral language centers yet and have had some requests to do so!

As with most infant teachers, I prefer to use a rota with the various groups in my classroom during play. I have a chart up on the door of the classroom with the group names written on it and the activities which are laminated, cut out and have Velcro on the back of them, stuck on beside each named group. I rotate the activities each morning so that the children are playing with something different each day and get a turn at every station.

The activities I include on my chart are listed below along with the clip art I use to represent each on my poster.

1. Lego and Jigsaws:

                                                    

2. Dolls (clothes, cot, bottle, etc) and cars:

 3. Doctor's Kit:

4. Restaurant/kitchen: 

 5. Shop:

 6. Sandpit (Only three children are allowed at this activity at one time so it is usually combined with another activity):

.

Hope you find this post useful for giving you some ideas of what you could include on your play rota. If you have any other great ideas for play areas in the classroom, I'd love to hear them in the comments section below.  

Maths Centers in the Morning!

Finally, I'm back to school after the summer hols and back to the blogging after a long hiatus!

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For the last two months before the holidays, I began trying out maths centers as an alternative to literacy and play/oral language centers. While the centers did not involve as much 'exploration' of the room as my literacy centers, this almost suited the mood of the children at the end of the year, as they can get quite hyper as the year comes to a close and the weather gets finer. I felt that these activities were still very enjoyable for the children but involved less classroom management issues as the children completed them all at their desks.

Here were the centers I chose (some of these I got off this site: http://www.kidscount1234.com/mathcentersandgames.html where you can find loooads more maths center ideas - colours, shapes, tessellation etc):

1.) Counting counters:

Each child at the table had one of the above sheets with different numbers on it. There was a bowl of counters in the middle of the table. The children put a given number of spots on the butterfly/ladybird, they put counters in the bag and 'apples' on the tree using counters. These sheets could be made using the numbers 1-10 but I felt at the end of the year that my students were well able to use numbers 1-20.

http://ithinkmaths.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/counters1.jpg?w=500

2.) More or Less Cubes:

The children were given a bowl/bag of cubes each (with two colours of cubes in the bowl). They wrote the two colour names at the top of the sheet over each column. They had to close their eyes and pick a handful of cubes out of the bowl/bag. Then they wrote in the amount of each colour they picked out under the colour name on the top two lines. They circled the colour number there was more of on this go. They repeated the exercise until the sheet was completed.

(Trust me, its easier than it sounds!)

http://www.thinktonight.com/v/vspfiles/photos/LER4285-2T.jpg

3.) Making Number Necklaces:

I gave each child at this table a sheet of the above sample and a jar of beads. They had to line up the beads around the shapes to make a 'necklace'. I would also consider having the children thread spools onto string for this exercise if you have the resources to do this and can label the strings with numbers!

                                                                                         

http://www.craftsuppliesforless.com/images/pearlized%20pony%20beads.jpg                                             http://www.bababump.com/

4.) Piggy Banks:

The children at this table each got one of these sheets of piggy banks each and they had to fill them with coins left on the table. We made quantities of 2c-10c using 1c, 2c, 5c and 10c coins.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/business/03/euro_cash/currency/img/5_2_1.jpg

5.) Race to Ten:

This is my favourite station as it is so brilliant to use as an informal way of introducing take away and revising addition with infants. Each child gets a game board and each of them take turns around the circle to roll two dice. One dice has numbers 1-6 on it and the other has a mixture of + and - signs on it. If they get a +3 they put on three counters, if they get a - 4 they take away 4 counters from the board, etc. The first child to ten is the winner.

These stations could definitely be changed and added to throughout the year especially with other bought maths games/shape hunts/number hunts/colour hunts etc, but I found these to be a good start with my Senior Infants. I may get a bit more adventurous with them as time goes on! 

Happy Teaching!

Literacy Centers in Senior Infants!

My kids love our new literacy centers - we spend about 15 minutes on them every second morning (alternating with structured play for oral language development!) Each table tries out a different activity everyday:

1.) Readers and Teachers: 

Working in pairs, one child, the ‘teacher’ pointed to words in the room (environmental print, words on posters, labels etc) and their partner the ‘reader’ (wearing cardboard glasses) read the words for them.

2.) Post Office:

 We write letters, cards, shopping lists and notes to our friends and to teacher on different kinds of paper and post them in the post box in the classroom. I have included some word charts to aid their writing (feelings, sports and activities, food, days of the week, months of the year etc).

3.) Label the Room:

  

We label things in the room using post-it notes. They either use invented spelling, words they know already or copy signs from the environment when writing these labels.

4.) Card Games:

 Where one person plays cvc spelling games, another matches sounds to pictures, another matches upper and lower case letters together and another matches words to the appropriate picture. 

5.) Magnetic Letters:  

We pick words from the box to spell on the whiteboard using magnetic letters. 

I have never used literacy centers before but I have to say I absolutely love it ... despite having to clean up all the post-its at the end of the day! I may change some of these centers when everyone has had a couple of goes at each center, but that won't be for a while yet! I'm also going to give maths centers a try sometime soon, but will get back to you on that one! Happy teaching!