Working on Word Families (with 2 freebies)!

I am so very excited that it is Friday!  Here’s my Five for Friday:

1. This was one of those weeks where I kept waking up 15-30 mins before my alarm and then attempted to fall back asleep each day for those last few minutes which just led to restless sleep of me constantly then just checking the clock to see how many minutes of sleep I had left…not the most amazing last little bit of sleep. Fingers crossed I’ll sleep in at least a little tomorrow and Sunday!

2. One thing I’ve been focusing on these first few weeks is establishing our reading classroom. The other day, I posted about our “What do good readers read” activity…check it out here.  Another part of setting the stage for our reading environment is finding out what my little friends like to read about topic-wise.  We made a list of things we like to read and I just had to share this pic because I love the randomness of it! I’m happy to see that they pretty much like to read about anything though! 🙂

And who doesn’t like to read about Katie Perry?!

3. Oh those word families….I love doing activities with word families because I find that my little friends are so successful with these activities. The rhyming and simple switching out of one letter really seems to be a concept that they can grasp quickly- mainly because of the repetition of word families.  I started using our Word Family Journals right away and our mini anchor posters to introduce our word families. I also read What Will Fat Cat Sit On? and had my little friends give me a thumbs up for each “-at” word family word they heard me read.

Then, I say one of our words and they color the star next to the word.  We continue to do this for each word.

After working in our journals, my little friends worked on separating words by word family.  They chose a paw print, read the word and then placed it on the right dog house.  Although I haven’t introduced all these word families yet, I was very happy to see that they understand concept of words in the same word families!

My little friends also worked on another center with our word families where they chose a word, read it and then matched it with the right picture.

 One more thing related to word families that we did this week was reading sentences and finding the specific word family.  We used markers which made this that much more exciting for everyone! 🙂

All these activities are leading my little friends to becoming good readers– after reading words by themselves, I always try to include a writing component and a ‘reading in context’ component so my little readers can see how it all fits together! These activities are all in my Word Families Bundle Pack that you can check out here!

4. Freebie #1! What’s the word family? This is a little extension page where students are actually practicing reading word family words within a sentence and then identify the word family of the underlined words in each sentence. This is a one of those follow up activities so you can see how students are actually reading the words in context. You can download this freebie here!

5. Freebie #2! Hm…see…can you tell…I do lots with word families (and CVC words)! The key to working with all these word family words and CVC words is to make sure kids understand how to apply it in context.  These activities are all ones that lead up to reading. This freebie is one I posted about over the summer, but I wanted to share it with you again, just in case you missed it.  My ‘walking through word families’ pages are a fun activity to use as a warm up to a small reading group, center, partner activity, however you see fit! I tell my little friends that we have to help these little kids get back to their homes. The only way we can help them is by reading all the words on the sidewalk.  It is so cute just how much my little friends buy into this…after reading a set of words, they are like ‘Mrs. Claahsen– did that kid get home ok??’ So cute! You can download this freebie right here!

Our fun pointers get used a lot…they are really math manipulatives though. 🙂