Dipthongs!

We're down to 24 days left in my district. Shame they're the craziest 24 days of the year! So much to do. So much I want to teach before they become second graders. So many fun things I want to fit in. So much cleaning will need to be done. Sigh. Ah well, we'll get through it.

This week we're practicing dipthongs. In what other profession do you get to say that?! Our spelling pattern this week is oy and oi. We've done vowel games before and one of the quick and easies was "Four in a Row". I feel this gives them reading practice with the spelling pattern without only using those 10 words and they have fun. You always have to sneak in the learning. (Muahhaha lol)

Click on the game board to download.

You'll need to make dice (or a spinner or alternate rules). I got the idea to create the dice after seeing another oy oi game on Pinterest. I was originally making the dice to play that game and then I decided to do a Four in a Row. Here are the dice I made. (I made one die for each group)

 

#YouMightBeAFirstGrader if during calendar you do the math to figure out how many days are left and you yell out "I wish there were 200 days of school!"

Story Map labels

While pinning the night away on Pinterest I ran across this story map worksheet and teacher version of a Story Map. (click image to take you to the blog of the creator) I really really liked the layout. Now, if you go to Pinterest and search for "Story Map" you'll find tons of great ideas but I thought this would be good for my firsties. Lucky for me the blog creator did a great job and it was a freebie. I'm going to make my teacher version tomorrow and even though I'm the teacher I don't always care for my handwriting, especially on something I may laminate. I decided I wanted some cute labels to jazz it up. So, since the lovely blogger from Funky First Grade Fun shared this as freebie I thought I'd do the same with my labels.

As you know I'm still new to the blogosphere and I haven't figured out how to embed a Google doc. I did see an article but I haven't practiced yet. So, please feel free to check out my TpT store to download my labels.(Click on the image to download)

Who Doesn't Love Fancy Nancy?!

So, I absolutely positively love Fancy Nancy books. I discovered these gems about three years ago and I was hooked!

Some of my Fancy Nancy Collection

I loved them so much and overly acted so excited to read them to my students that I had a girl actually go as Fancy Nancy for Halloween. She even had the stuffed Frenchy doll! It was toooo cute for words. I still get thrilled to read those books and I'm happy that they've caught on and that there are more to choose from. April is poetry month so we're introducing using 'spicy' interesting words.My friend Fancy Nancy is perfect for this. I created a little word book to write down our interesting words. You can download a copy of it here for free.

Fancy Nancy Word Book

 

 

 

 

So, each day we're going to read a different Fancy Nancy book and discuss the new and exciting words we learned from Nancy. We'll write the regular word and the new fancy word we learned. Then, we choose our favorite fancy word to write a fancy sentence.

When they finished they got to color the Nancy. Even the boys in my room, well many of them, were making her dress fancy. A lot of them colored it lavender because we learned that lavender is Nancy's favorite color and that it is a fancy word for light purple. The books do a great job about pointing out that a word is fancy and telling us the meaning. There's evening a little glossary in the back to review them. They're great.

I'm also doing a mini-bulletin board. If this week of Fancy Words goes well I'm totally going amp it up next year and make a super fancy glammed up board. We'll call this my beginner board.