It’s a Fall Freebie Friday!

I cannot believe it’s already nearing the very end of September- this month has flown right by me! Here’s a little peek at my week:

1. Pick a Pebble! I almost always begin my reading groups with a little phonemic awareness warm up activity.  I am well aware that phonemic awareness is something that can be done in the dark vs phonics being something the kids actually see/manipulate; however, since I do a daily phonemic awareness warm up, I like to include a variety of activities.  One thing that I love to grab from my phonemic awareness basket is my little Pick a Pebble container.

Each student gets 3-4 pebbles and then puts a pebble on their sound boxes for each sound they hear in the word. The shiny, pretty pebbles really make identifying sounds in words much more exciting!

Sidenote: these pebbles are from many years ago from some museum I went to…haha…glad I’m putting them to use. 🙂 You can easily recreate this in your phonemic awareness activities too- just grab some rocks or pebbles- trust me, they are fun to use! (Oh and really, this can be done in the dark…just wouldn’t be quite as enjoyable because you wouldn’t be able to see the pebbles!)

2. The weather has been absolutely amazing this week and my little friends have been busy all week long working on our Fall activities! They were cracking me up trying to determine what Fall really is– they kept talking about winter thinking we’d be making snow angels soon…which could very well be true seeing we live in Chicago, but I’m hoping they’ll get a better understanding of Fall as the season keeps going!

We practiced story sequence by writing what happens first, next and last on their Fall day.

My little friends practiced reading CVC words and sorting by word families. They also did a recording sheet showing what they know on the iPads!

I decided to introduce long vowels with silent e way earlier this year with my 1st graders than normal because I really want to expose them early since we’ve got to meet those Common Core Standards. I know it’ll take a lot of practice, but they are doing well so far! They read words and then sorted by short or long vowel.

My little friends worked on writing with making predictions for Fall.  We will check back on these predictions in a few weeks to see if we were right.

I had to include some football fun for Fall in our activities, so we did some rhyming football practice!

Had to squeeze digraphs in too…

We did some comparing & contrasting of Summer and Fall- I did lots of modeling for this because compare & contrast will definitely be coming up frequently throughout the year.

3. We also worked on this little Fall freebie! My little friends got busy reading and creating CVC words with these leaf letter cards. They choose a tree card with a CVC word first, read it and then use the leaves to recreate the word. Each friend read the word one more time after creating the word too. You can grab it here!

4. Label Fun! I love a good label party— it’s just really so fun for students to be able to label anything and everything. First, I introduce labeling with my little Hawaiian shirt (I like choosing a random object to make it more memorable!). I have the students help me come up with labels for each part of the shirt.

Then each student gets a few labels and they write labels for things around our classroom. They love sticking them on the items! Of course Mr. Frog needs a label too. 🙂

Another label activity that my little friends love is choosing a stuffed animal from my basket, taking a picture of it and then adding labels. (We did this in Skitch.)

We also labeled these cute little people cards which I got over the summer in the Dollar Spot at Target!

5. Running Club began this week- it’s twice a week for an extra hour after school and it really is fun- especially with the weather being so nice. Only problem is that I no longer feel like running since I get home at least an hour later than normal…but hopefully I’ll be better next week with running afterward!

Hm…definitely can tell I didn’t blog at all this week because I sure had a lot to share! Love my Friday link ups with the great Doodlebugs and TBA!