This is one Friday....err, Saturday, that I am glad has arrived! Whew, what a week! We have been so busy and I have so much to share with you! I started writing this post last night and FELL ASLEEP right there at my computer! haha
It's Five for Friday time!
1. I spent all of last week with my little sister. I have not seen her in about 3 years as she lives in Houston and I live in Virginia. She is now a mommy and I have a chunky little nephew that I got to adore and spoil for the entire week. We went to the pumpkin patch and celebrated my grandmother's 80th birthday!! It was perfect.
2. I have a ton of new and exciting things coming up for you guys! You are NOT going to want to miss this. Next weekend kicks off our October Facebook Frenzy hosted by Creation Castle. The weekend after that is a Super Sleuth blog hop, hosted by Comprehension Connection. And soon after that will be an AMAZING giveaway and blog hop weekend hosted by none other than....me! YAY! It will be my first big giveaway and blog hop. Lots of more details to come.
3. I have been working on phoneme segmentation with a group of students and I came up with this crazy, fun game today. Do you ever have those spur of the moment ideas that you just have to try? I had to scrap my planned lesson for the day, because this was just too good not to do.
So here is what we did. We have tiled hallways so when we walk in the hall we teach our kids to follow the track of tiles like a train. I took the kids into the hallway and had 5 of them each stand in a square on the floor. Then I had 5 other students stand on their path several tiles away. The students should be facing each other. The game became a version of red light, green light. I would call a word for the first student and they had to segment the word, stepping into a tile for every sound (their own physical push and say boxes). We would go through each student having a turn. The students would be moving toward each other. The first set of students to meet in the middle were the winners!
After playing our game several times, we lined up into our "train" on our "track" to go back to the classroom. Since we were in line on a tiled floor, I had the students continue to segment words as they walked back to the classroom. We went all the way back to the classroom, by segmenting sounds for every tile on the floor!
4. I have a student in my class that just moved here from Mexico and does not understand any English. We have been working for about two weeks on some English words and she now knows how to say hello, good morning, bye, bus, thank you, drink, cat, dog, and nearly all of her colors! What a success! So proud!
5. I am putting together some new fluency folders for my kiddos. I am really excited about it. I will be posting about it soon!!