Contraction Action!

Contractions can be a difficult concept to teach to kids…especially to struggling readers…so the more interactive the lessons can be to teach contractions, the better!

Normally I’m not used to teaching about contractions so early in the year, but my 2nd graders were ready for it and it fit right along with our guided reading texts, so we dove in last week, learning all about contractions! Most of these ideas I found on Pinterest, so I’m not claiming these ideas as my own, but they did work super well in helping my friends understand contractions. 🙂

First we made an anchor chart and each day repeated “A contraction has an apostrophe that takes the place of letters you see.” It’s a nice little rhyming sentence which helped my friends catch on quickly.  We then made contractions out of the various examples at the bottom for practice taking two words and turning them into the shorter form.

 I then read Alfie the Apostrophe. Both my friends and I just loved this book- Alfie is quite the apostrophe! This story gives great ideas about how and when to use apostrophes.

We also loved the apostrophe page in this book- after I read this short story to my little friends, we used highlighter tape to find different examples of apostrophe’s in the text. We’ll be doing that in our guided reading texts next week as well. It’s a super way to make sure my friends are actually reading the contraction forms of the words rather than the longer format because that is definitely a common problem when reading!

We then made these two contraction foldables- super simple, but so useful! My little friends loved making their own too- I told them to make sure they quizzed their parents at home this weekend to see if they could figure out the contractions. 🙂

Of course it’s always fun to practice contractions with QR codes too! All my friends do is find the matching long form for each contraction and then scan the QR code to make sure they grabbed the correct card. You can check out this pack here!