Summer Share and Prepare: CVC Crossword Puzzles

Happy Thursday everyone! I am linking up with the super-sweet Marie from Once Upon a Classroom: A Teacher's Tale for her Summer Share and Prepare link up!

With this link up, we get to share all sorts of different resources we use in our classrooms. Then we get to hop around to everyone else who linked up and prepare for the upcoming school year! I have been having a great time with this linky, sharing many of the Write the Room activities I use in my classroom!! This week I'd like to share my newest creation!

This is something I'm going to use during our Word Work rotation times. As I introduce each new word family, we will use the sheets in this packet to help practice.

Working on crossword puzzles was one of my mom's all-time favorite activities, and I used to love helping her figure out the different clues. My mom was the inspiration for this newest packet.

I wanted my kinders to be able to complete crossword puzzles, but I knew I had to keep them as simple as possible. I thought the best way to do that was to use CVC words and pictures, since these are familiar words and there are only three letters to write per word.

 I made sure to cover every medial vowel and as many word families as I could find clipart for! There are at least five puzzles for each medial vowel, and then at the end of the packet are puzzles with all of the vowels mixed up. The image above shows all of the different word families that I created puzzles for.

The clues are pictures of the CVC word. Each clue is labeled with a number and an arrow. The top box are for clues going across, and the bottom box are for clues going down. Students should find the matching number and arrow combination on the puzzle and write the CVC word for each picture.

I'm going to use these puzzles during Word Work rotation times, but they would work perfectly as morning work or homework. You could even leave them for a substitute as a quick and easy activity for your kiddos to complete!!

Would you like to win a pack? Just enter the Rafflecopter below!! I'll choose a winner this weekend!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Don't want to wait to see if you've won?? You can purchase this pack in my TPT store for 50% OFF today and tomorrow ONLY!! If you win a pack and you've already purchased one, I'll send you a product of equal or lesser value!!

Swing back over to Once Upon a Classroom:A Teacher's Tale to see who else has linked up, and get yourself prepared for this upcoming school year!

Don't forget that it's not too late to link up for Spotlight Saturday! This link up is a Teacher's Show and Tell to share our favorite resources, products, activities, tips, ideas, tricks, and anything else that makes our classroom lives easier!

Throw Back Thursday

Happy Thursday everyone!!  Tomorrow is the 4th of July already!!  Why oh why does the summer go by so much faster than the school year??  I hope that all of you fabulous educators have had some time to rest and relax!!

Today I'm going to link up with The Teaching Tribune for their Throwback Thursday, and put my own little spin on it.

The idea is to share a post from a while back, which I will do at the very end of this post.  First, I want to 'throwback' to last Monday when I shared with you how I am trying to get 100 products up in my TPT store.  I wanted to share with you my progress!!

Slowly but surely I am working towards reaching my goal!  One of the newest products I added to my store is a FREEBIE that I will be using during the beginning of the year.  It is a booklet that they can work on independently during Word Work time of our Daily 5 rotations.

This takes a wee bit of prep work to get it ready for your littles.  Print out the pages and then slice them in half.  Staple the half pages together, either in ABC order or mix them up.  There are handwriting lines on each page where my kinders can practice writing their letters.  If you don't want to handwriting lines on there, just slice them off before you assemble the booklets.

Learners need to identify the uppercase letter at the top of each page and then find the matching lowercase letter buddy.  I'm going to have my kinders use BINGO dotters to put a dot under the correct letter, but if you don't have dotters just have your littles color in the circle.  I am working on a whole set of these booklets that my kinders can work on during Word Work time of Daily 5 while I meet with other students.  So far I have uploaded the uppercase version of this book (the set up is the same but the lowercase letters are at the top and learners have to find the matching uppercase letter at the bottom), and the beginning sound version. By the end of today I will have uploaded the CVC version, and by the end of the week I'll have added the number books. {click on the image of the cover page to go to my TPT store and snap it up.}

The uppercase book is a steal for $2.00 and is up in my TPT store now.

This is a sample page from the uppercase book.  Learners look at the lowercase picture at the top and find the matching uppercase letter at the bottom.  They can practice writing the letters, or you can slice off the handwriting lines before you set the books up.

The beginning sound book is in my TPT store for $3.00.

For each vowel, I included a picture for both the long and short sounds of the vowel.  The letters are all lowercase, and in the elkonian-box-style font used in the other books.  This may help my kinders recognize the formation of the letters.

Each consonant has one picture.  The handwriting lines can be used to practice writing the letters, or can be used for students to sound out the word and write down the sounds they hear.  If you don't need to handwriting lines, just slice them off before you staple the booklets together.

As my kinders finish each booklet, they are going to keep it inside their Daily 5 book box so that they can practice reading it during Read to Self or Read to Someone Else time.

Now, I'd like to throwback to a post I wrote back in October.  We were practicing identifying character and setting in stories, and I came up with a quick activity they could complete to demonstrate their understanding of that standard.  To learn more, click the picture to take you back to that October post!!

Check back with me tomorrow for Free Font Friday!!

I'd like to leave you with an awesome linky party I happened across earlier this week hosted by Farley over at Oh Boy Fourth Grade, called 'Currently'.  She has provided a template to use for the month of July.  I've seen the 'Currently' templates on other blogs and always wondered about them, so I was super stoked when I stumbled across the blog where I could FINALLY join up with this!!  I'll make sure to include on at least once a week.  If you want to join up with this, click on Farley's blog link to go over and get a template for yourself!!

Be safe tomorrow, and don't forget that your four-legged babies tend to get scared when the fireworks go off.  Statistics say July 4th is the day when most dogs run away, so take care of your furbabies!!

A Look Ahead...

Happy Tuesday!!  I hope your day is a terrific one!  Have you started the count-down to the end of the year yet??  I know I have!  There are 14 more days until the last day of school in my district, thanks to all of the snow days we had this year.  Our student's last day of school is June 13th, and teacher's last day is June 16th.  As crazy as it sounds (and yes, it is a bit crazy), I have already started thinking about things I want to do next year.  I have drawn out a map of how I want to rearrange my room next year, and have started thinking of activities I can do in the beginning of the year with my littles.  I know that this year isn't over yet, but I also know that if I post about what I want to do next year then I am holding myself accountable for actually doing it!!  Once I have things implemented next year, I'll be posting about how it actually went compared to how I envision it working out.  :-)

  This is the first year I have done the Daily 5 and my kinders LOVED it!  I started later in the year and have been taking many notes for how I want to do things differently next year.  I have been thinking of new ways to organize supplies, activities for my kinders to do with their 5th Grade Buddies, and how to do the Daily 3 for math.  I have been making TONS of lists and trying to keep track of all my ideas...I need to come up with some sort of system for all those notes.  But that's a post for another day!

  One of the things I want to do differently next year is to kick off the Daily 5 (and the Daily 3 in math) during the first full week of school.  This means I will need simple yet engaging activities to provide during their rotations.  I don't know about you all, but the first six weeks or so in kindergarten are a bit of a blur for me.  So much time spent on setting up routines, rules, and procedures and lots of modeling and practice.  I tend to forget sometimes that I ended the year with littles ready for 1st grade and now I'm back at square one again!!  :-)  Part of our Daily routines will be having them work independently while I am working with a group.  Since many of them are still learning what it's like to be at school all day, the activities I provide in the beginning of the year are simple ones that do not require much direct supervision.  This is a PERFECT time to use some of my 'Color Your Own Match-Up' activities.  I'll let you in on a little secret about me...I am OBSESSED with all things Crayola!  I found these little gems on clearance at Wally World and HAD to have them.  To justify the expense (though they were a STEAL at $5 a piece!!) I created a whole slew of activities where I would get to use my little treasures when I made the samples.  :-)

  During our Daily 5 rotations in language arts, I will be having my students create and use various puzzle-piece matching activities.  Everyone will start with the Beginning Sound Match Up pieces and move on to the Rhyming Words Match Up pieces as they are ready.

For the Beginning Sound activity, there are two puzzle pieces per letter.  One half has the upper-case letter and the matching half has a picture of something that begins with that letter. 

  Students would start out by coloring their pieces during Word Work time.  It seems that, inevitably, every year I will have a few students who only care about being the first ones done.  This means they will often rush through assignments, especially coloring things.  They have a tendency to color every picture the same scribbly blob, sometimes so you can no longer tell what they were originally trying to color.  Next year I am going to try and encourage ALL of them to take their time and do their best work, and I have sketched out a few ideas to help with this.  First I will show them the pieces I colored and discuss with them their opinions and thoughts.  We'll work together to create a class web about 'What Good Illustrators Do" and refer back to it throughout the first few weeks of school.  There will be a coloring contest where my kinders get their work judged by their 5th Grade Buddies.  So many ideas came from just one little activity!!

  I colored a sample set of all of the pieces in this activity and then took pictures of the pages so I could project them up onto the SMART Board.  I want to have a whole group discussion on their honest opinions of the pages I colored.

  I'll ask them if it looks like I took my time and tried my best to stay in the lines.  Someone almost always points out the times I wasn't able to stay in the lines, so we talk about if that's okay or not.  On the SMART Board, I show them examples of trying to stay in the lines compared to ones where there was nothing but scribble-scrabble and they discuss which ones they like better and why.

I point out how I tested each color before I used it so that I would know if I really wanted to use that color or not in my picture.  I explained to them that testing out the colors first helped minimize my mistakes.  We talk about where a good spot to test a color would be, like 'empty white space' on the front of the page, or anywhere on the back of the page.

I show them that I did not use just one color in my pictures, and that I tried to be as creative as possible.  We talk about how the artist of the clip art has provided us with a blank canvas, and challenge each other to try something original and use as many colors in one picture as possible.

Most of the students will say that they want to take their time and do the best coloring they can, and it is always interesting to see the different color combinations and designs they come up with.

I wanted to make this activity available before summer break started, so that you could have time over the summer to color your own.  I will be coloring another set myself, since my darling furbaby Isis knocked over a glass of soda onto the set you see in these pictures.  Her tail is a dangerous thing, and my nephew refers to it as 'a weapon of mass destruction!'.  It's a good thing I enjoy coloring!!  :-)

Memorial Day Sale!!

Happy Memorial Day everyone!!  I would like to thank all of the brave soldiers out there who fight so hard to keep us free, including many of my own family members.  Today is a day to remember all of those who gave their all to preserve the security of this wonderful country of ours!!

In order to show my appreciation, I am throwing a 15% off SALE in my TPT store.  EVERY item is on sale through midnight of May 27th.  Come and check out some of the great new activities I have been working on, and pick up a few freebies while you're there!

Need some Word Work activities to use during Daily 5 rotations or center time?  Check these out!!

This is a packet of three word work activities that I created to go along with our fourth quarter study of the animals of the world and their habitats.  There is an activity to pick a CVC picture card and find the matching word on their recording sheet, an activity to roll a cube and identify the CVC picture and then fill in a box on their recording sheet, and a Concentration-type CVC game that could also be placed at a pocket chart center.  If you download the preview, you can see a glimpse of what is included in the packet.

Believe it or not, my kinders are working on identifying the five main parts of a sentence, including that it must have a beginning capital letter, ending punctuation, a subject, and a verb.  I created a Write the Room activity where they crack the picture code in order to write a simple sight word sentence.  They are then to illustrate the sentence, which shows their understanding of the sentence.  My littles then diagram the sentence by using our 'stop light' symbols to show the main parts of the sentence.  This became such a HUGE hit in my room, I created a second packet (and am working on a third!)

I hope you take a few minutes to hop on over to my TPT store and snag some activities!  Have a great holiday!!