Five for Friday November 11

I am linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for Five for Friday. Thank you for hosting, Kacey!

       

Rocket Words!

We do Rocket Words each morning after calendar time.  I choose a few sight words.  We spell them as we squat for each letter, then spring up as we say the word.   The kids love it. It's a great Brain Break anytime of the day. It's sad when I feel it in my thighs if  we do a lot of Rocket Words... I'm not gonna lie... but, no pain, no gain!

Well, the kids love it so much that they started doing it by themselves, so I took full advantage.

I made a Rocket Words sign and added the Rocket Words of the day.  When anybody finishes early, they can go to the rug and practice Rocket Words-  oh so easy and they forget they're learning!  Plus, they invented it, so that's even better.

I took a quick little video of some of my kids doing a couple words to show you. I just caught it at the end of their list.

                                       

I wrote a post STUFFED FULL of Turkey Freebies from TpT!  Enjoy!  Enjoy!  I hope you find lots you can use these next couple of weeks.

This is a fun little activity I also leave up for early finishers.  The kids also "play teacher" at free choice and do this.  We first did it together as a morning activity, so they knew what to do.  

I used Post-its, but they didn't stick that well after a while, so I stuck the Post-it to a Popsicle stick with tape. 

The red endings go with the red letters, and blue with blue.  We worked on these sight words, and then used the sight words as endings to create new words.  The kids just hold the ending behind of each single letters and read the word.  Simple!



(I taped these on to show you, but pretend someone is holding the ending.)



Here is a little trick I use to help some of my children who have a hard time with transition numbers counting to 100.  I let them use their fingers as "groups of ten" to remind them what number comes next.  When they count to ten, they hold up one finger, as they say all the teen numbers.  Then as they go from 19 to 20, they put up two fingers for "twenty,"  then 29 to 30, they add a finger so they have three fingers to remind them the next number is "30," and so on.  This really helps some of  my kids.  They see 5 fingers up and know the number will be "50."  They learn quickly this way, and then don't need those fingers any more!

When we count by 10's together during our calendar time, I have the children hold up a finger for each ten  - ( 10 (one finger), 20 ( two fingers), 30 (three fingers)...  so they see again how having six fingers up reminds them the ten is "sixty," and so on...

This is a fun little game my mother plays with the children to practice letters, sounds, numbers, sight words, shapes- in other words- ANYTHING!  The kids LOVE it. Mostly, they love it because my mother is SO enthusiastic and so much fun, the kids cannot wait to work with her.  She comes in each day during center time to work with the kids.  It is heavenly. It makes such a wonderful difference to have someone besides me work with the children and make learning so much fun!  If teacher colleges taught one skill for teaching, it would be ... BE ENTHUSIASTIC!  Act like learning is fun, and you know what????  The children will believe LEARNING IS FUN!  

This first quick video shows some of my girls playing the game with letter sounds. It's sort of like a "Letter War" game. 

This video shows  two of my girls working on letter recognition.  One really needs the practice and the other can use the reinforcement and confidence.  It's great for both of them.  

It's funny because you may think this would work only for "competitive" children.  But for some reason, every single child BECOMES competitive when they play.  I think it's because they are so proud to show what they know.  They are not really thinking about "beating" the other player as much as being proud of the cards they get.

Thank you for stopping by and sharing some moments from my week.  Have a wonderful weekend.  And... to all the Veterans on this Veterans Day...

so very much!