What Do You See On Your Way To School?

An interactive Writing Activity.

I love to read "And to Think I Saw It On Mulberry Street" to the class the first week or two after returning to school. This year I have created a simple interactive writing activity to go with the book. 

Discuss some of the ways the students get to school and what they see along the way. You can direct the discussion toward several topics such as safety or real characters versus fantasy characters.  

The instructions offer many ways to use the patterns from Kindergarten on up. This activity can be used to teach and practice new vocabulary, descriptive writing, parts of speech, and alliteration in a fun and easy way. It can then be taken home to show parents and caregivers what the students have learned.

The patterns and instructions are available at the Wendy's Bookworks store at Teachers Pay Teachers.  CLICK HERE to download now.

Learning Letters the Fun Way with Alphabet Art

For years teachers and parents have been telling me how much they love Alphabet Art!  Whether the kids are turning an uppercase P into Pig or a lowercase d into dinosaur, they remember the letter and the sound association. Cutting out the letters enhances the muscle memory for writing that letter as well as small motor practice.

Alphabet letters are so versatile!  They can be used for letter recognition/sound association games, learning sequential order, and putting together letters to make words. 

  Here are a few more ways to use the letters in Alphabet Art:

 1. Make tactile letters with cotton balls or Mardi Gras beads 

2. Lace the letters 

3. F is for finger painting 

4. Print practice is more fun when you do it with crayon resist

5. C makes a great picture collage 

Get more great ideas by watching our VIDEO:

  Alphabet Art will be on sale August 17th - 20th 

Click here to visit Teachers Pay Teachers

Back to School!

Just a Reminder about our Back to School Night Desktop Diorama.

It's Fun, Easy, Informative, Impressive AND FREE!!

This easy-to-make diorama base can be used all year long for any subject!

The free download is available on Teachers Pay Teachers and Teacher's Notebook.

Click Here to download from TPT.

Click here to download from Teacher's Notebook.

Zip to Success This School Year!!

It's back to school and here we go again!

Most adults would say that the goal of a reading program is to produce a student that can competantly read written material, comprehend the material, integrate the material into his or her own knowledge base and then communicate clearly in a response. And yet we adults can't seem to agree on the methods to achieve that goal. Last school year we watched as the kids in our homework tutoring program (most of whom are bi-lingual) were rushed through the basic phonics decoding skills, leaving them confused about all the long vowel patterns. They read endless "fluency" passages in one minute but could not answer a question about what they had just read.  Finally, in what seemed like a desperate measure, the second and third graders were told to read a story every day and write the beginning, the middle and the end - apparently in three sentences. Common Core wants kids to say "I Can"; these kids were saying "I Can't".

This year start using the Tutor Quick Pocket Slider with the Phonics and Spelling Zip Strips. You can build a successful program, achieving all the Common Core goals, with this product. The word lists are organized by phonetic patterns. Start the week by reviewing the words before they go in the pocket. The picture provides comprehension. Put the strip in the pocket and practice both reading and spelling the words for morning work or in a center. Use the words to have the children brainstorm and create three or more sentences using the words on the list for fluency practice. During the week, use some of the eleven extension activities to teach rhyming, grammer, syllables, antonyms, synonyms alphabet order and sentence writing. Make an extra pocket with the parents at back to school night and explain that homework will be to practice reading and spelling  the words for the week with the pocket. Homework planning done!!

I am posting pictures of some of the extension activities. You will see that they are simple and use the word lists that the kids cut and paste to create their own "worksheets". The file folder games use colorful cut outs, but I have not colored the pictures. Lost pieces are easy to replace by just making another copy of the words and cutting it up.

FREE samples of the pocket slider, zip strips, instuctions and extensions are available on my web site http://www.wendysbookworks.com or at my store at
Teachers Pay Teachers.

Zip to Success this school year!!