Obama Craft

Hi, the kiddos are working on a Obama craft. It's his symbol for the campaign. Do you remember it? A simplified version is mention in a previous post.
On the funny side. Do you know about the Califone talking card machines? You know the one... it reads cards with a cassette tape strip at the bottom, or you can record your own words. Great for site word learning. Well ours "did not work". Did you know there was a battery compartment under it and an on off switch for the record function? Well, there is and ours was off. Who knew. We're in business now! LOL

Great Dolch Words Site

Dolch words are the top 220 words children encounter while reading. This is a great site with the words divided into 11 lists and with monitoring sheets. It also has monthly activities.
Dolch Work Kit

More Concept Maps

Concept map of words that go with pumpkin.

Close up of pictures in the poster about homes.

Illustration of a kitchen. Magazine are an invaluable tool in the classroom for older students. They are age appropriate and yet, if your students need to work on cutting and fine motor skills, you get to address both needs. Please make sure you read the next post also. Thanks for stopping by.

Concept Development Using Magazines

Here is a poster that was made by the whole class. We had talked about homes and houses for some time. We had discussed what went into a home. Words of importance included, big/small, ranch/two-story, garage, basement, country/city, apartment, trailer, modular, own, rent, backyard, porch, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom etc. The students, with minimal assistance from the adults, cut pictures out of magazines to illustrate their concept understanding. As they presented them to the class to be put on the poster, they had to use the word in a sentence. This activity usually spans two to three days at 50 minutes per class period.

New Word List

Here are the words that we are currently working on for the next two weeks.

• house
• good
• show
• new
• family
• build
• fall
• pumpkin
• brown
• orange
• yellow
• red
• acorn
• football
• October

We worked on a concept web yesterday. Today we added pictures from magazines to support the concepts. The topic was house and or home. The Words we connected to the topic were: big, small, two-story, ranch, basement, apartment, trailer, modular, boat, city, country, garage, rooms, house, new, old, rent and own.

Vocabulary List Two

The Friday Folders are going really well. I've gotten them all back within two days! That's outstanding. I'm preparing for parent conferences at the moment. Here's our second set of words. These words came from the past two New-2-You we have read. One was about the High School Musical 2 and the other one was about rescued dogs. Both stories were very popular with the students.

• school
• home
• money
• help
• kids
• movie
• DVD
• music
• TV
• dance
• dog
• friend

I've been taking pictures of my hands-on activities. Pictures to follow soon...

Vocabualy List One

I have a slightly different philosophy about vocabulary and site words for my students. I believe safety words are important, but they do not provide rich language activities and class discussions. Consequently, I use words from current events and words used most frequently in the students' daily conversations. This list incluedes words that describe activities in the classroom. These words allowed me to discuss the class routine and rules. It really helped the students to learn the classroom procedures. ( We cover a list of words every two weeks.)

• island ( part of my behavior plan)
• numbers (writing numbers to 100)
• words (reading and speaking new words)
• message (language story on the board every morning)
• calendar
• chart ( point for responsible behavior)
• calculator
• treasure (behavior plan)
• math
• read
• pencil
• notebook (contains messages)
• computer
• add
• folder (all loose paper go in it)