Reading with Jen Strange

1,000 reviews!

Today is exciting for me (because I'm very nerdy.)  Today someone left the 1,000th feedback for items in my store!

I've been selling educational products at Teachers Pay Teachers since Feb. 2012.  It's taken five and a half years and 85 items in my store to get to 1,000 reviews!

Since I'm so excited about reaching this milestone, I'm going to feature some reviews for one of my best-selling products: 

Early Literacy Tools: Elkonin boxes and Medial Vowel Set EXTENDED SET

This product has over 100 pages of early literacy activities for grade-schoolers, including full color games and posters, bookmarks, moveable alphabet, and worksheets.

I love when teachers tell me their students who are struggling are having success with my products.  That has always been the goal: rethinking how we present information to students and giving them another chance to understand.

Stephanie N. - Great resource for literacy stations or teacher directed reading groups!

Richelle A. - I have used this with kids who struggled with phonemic segmentation and it made a huge difference in their learning!

Andrea K. - My K and 1st grade special needs students are learning how to read and this product is really helping them!

Michelle77 - Great for my students who are struggling!  Thank you!

Thank YOU to everyone who purchases my products, and a special thanks to those of you who take the time to leave a review!

 

 

Blank Board Games for Fall / Winter Holidays

School just started for many of us in the United States (first week of August for those of us in mid-Tennessee!), and that means that fall is just around the corner!  (And pumpkin-flavored everything!)

A lot of Teachers Pay Teachers creators make specific lesson content and add a fall or winter theme . . . but my thinking is that there's no WAY I could ever know what kind of content a teacher is teaching during the weeks leading up to Halloween versus the weeks leading up to Christmas.  (And no way I could cover all the possibilities.)

THEREFORE.

The cards that come with my Blank Board Games are fully customizable so that teachers can use them for ANY lesson content they need.  Customize in a computer program, or print the cards and customize with Sharpies.  Your kids will love the full-color graphics and the chance to play a game to strengthen their learning.

Each of the 4 gameboard designs comes in multiple color combinations and contains multiple matching card sets.

See the Fall / Winter Holiday Blank Board Game Pack in my store now!

Rhyming Game in Action

Last Friday I spent the morning doing an observation in a 1st grade classroom in Nashville, and in the afternoon I was a visiting reading specialist at my best friend's Montessori enrichment program.  I had a good time reading with the students, and then testing out some of my Teachers Pay Teachers materials.

This is us playing my Rhyming Words Board Game (the kids did such a great job playing with the words!) I love seeing my stuff in action!

Lorien, for some reason, drew almost every "lose a turn" card in the stack.  I was ROLLING at her reactions.

Inflectional Endings

Another thing we worked on yesterday was inflectional endings.  I adore my Wednesday student - he's very energetic like my son, loves baseball, and always has something very interesting to tell me.  But he has this habit of skipping over inflectional endings!

(What's an inflectional ending?  When we add letters to the end of a word to change its meaning.  Some examples are changing verb tenses by adding -s, -ed, and -ing, making a word an adverb by adding -ly, or making a noun plural by adding -s or -es.)

This dear child will see the sentence:  The cats played in the tree.

And he will read: The cat play in the tree.

He's CLOSE, but he's missing important stuff in those words!  So I've been trying to figure out how to get him to notice these letters and how their presence changes a word.  Last night we focused on verbs: I had him read some sentences I wrote, identify the verb, and then write the verb in the correct column, according to its ending.  He loves writing on the white board, so he happily wrote the lists.

I'm working on making something cool that we can come back to and practice with.  Stay tuned.  :)

-------------------------

UPDATE: I created a file folder board game with two verb focus options: inflectional endings, or helping verbs.  These 2-4 player detective- themed games are perfect for literacy centers, small group work, or independent play. Assemble as file folder games.

In the first game, students draw a card, read the sentence, identify the helping verb, then move their piece to the space on the game board with that helping verb. 

In the second game, students draw a card, read a sentence, find the action verb, and identify the inflectional ending (s, ed, or ing.) The same 117 sentences are used (some are modified) for both games.

See the Reading Practice Verbs Game here.

CVC words

I strongly believe that CVC words are the first words we should teach young readers.  Why?

- there are a LOT of CVC words that are familiar objects / concepts to kids: mom, dad, dog, cat, hat, box, leg, fan, rug, etc.

- most CVC words are pure as far as phonics go: they can be easily sounded out.  They're straight-forward; the letters act as we expect them to.

- by starting with CVC words, we teach students to look FIRST at the letters in a word, and base their next step on those letters.  Figuring out a CVC word means thinking, not guessing.

I'm extremely confident in a product I made over the course of the last year (edits and updates and revisions galore!) that has everything you need to teach a young reader to read CVC words.  It's fun, it's interactive, and flexible.

If you'd like to view this item in my store, click below:

Early Literacy Tools: Elkonin Boxes EXTENDED set.

There's also a BASIC set (same items, but less of them and costs less), and a FREE SAMPLE.

Flash Freebie!

UPDATE: freebie offer has expired!

Hey there, TpT followers and blog readers!

My most recent Blank Board Game is a Dinosaur set, and it's SO INCREDIBLY CUTE.

And for a short time, I'm going to just up and give this thing to you, because I appreciate your support!  Plus, I just got married and I'm all happy and feeling generous. 

I'll leave this up for a week (so until Nov. 21st.)  After that, you can email me within the next week and I'll still give it to ya. (jenstrange AT gmail DOT com)  When November's gone, so is the freebie.  :)

Don't forget to visit my store at TpT, 'cause it's awesome:

P.S. ah, yes, the wedding.  Here's my favorite pic so far:

I wore purple, he wore green - our favorite colors.  We got married at the beautiful Belmont Mansion in Nashville, TN.  It was absolutely lovely.

10 poems with Elkonin Box format for rhymes

My firm belief in the usefulness of Elkonin boxes to help emerging readers identify what they hear inspired me to expand the concept to rhymes and poems.

These simple, 4-line poems have very obvious rhymes at the end of each line.  Each of the 10 poems is about a concrete object, and uses images of that object as a manipulative.  (The only exception is a ghost named “Sue,” where you’re listening for zoo, two, and boo.)

TO USE:  Show student the image, identify the object shown (for example: “I see a duck! Can you say ‘duck’?) and explain that you’re going to read a poem.

“This poem uses rhyming words, and we’re going to listen for words that sound like ‘duck.’  When you hear a word with the same ending as ‘duck,’ put a picture of the duck in this box.”

This activity can be extended with the included Worksheet.  There are cover images for each poem in case you want to set these up as File Folder Activities.  Also included are individual 4-square mat sets so you can work with more than one child at a time.

The 10 poems can be purchased on their own, or as part of a larger Rhyming Games and Activities set.

Click here to view it in my store.

Making your own board games

I currently have LOT of Blank Board Games in my Teachers Pay Teacher store.  I was thinking today about how having flexibility to create your own cards for a board game lets a teacher adapt any curriculum to a game, and then I got to thinking about how board games (and card games) work, and how many students could make their own, given some quick guidelines.

WikiHow has a great article on the matter: Make Your Own Board Game.

I think using file folders works beautifully for board games - the added bonus is that they're extremely easy to store.  Using file folders for the prototype and then moving on to a more sturdy cardboard set-up is a good idea as well.

For those needing a little structure for the cards, just a reminder that all my Blank Board Games come with blank printable (and editable) cards in a variety of colors - they can
be used as a starting point for your own creativity.  :)

UPDATE: I put together a set of BLANK "Color Your Own" Blank Board Games - they are just the empty templates, ready to color!  There's lots of ways to use them.

There are four different board game designs in this set. Also included are blank game cards and blank folder covers to customize. (Please note, the images of completed boards are to serve as an example of how this set can be used; those completed boards are not included in this set.)

Teachers can use these to create a board game with any theme they can draw or find stickers for. 

These games are great for student use - anything from group projects, a fun activity for early finishers, or as an alternative assessment to demonstrate proficiency in a particular subject. Also great for home-schoolers and students who love to express their creativity!

Click here to view this set in my store.

New and improved Word Sorts - make your own!

The students I tutor have often not had success with basic skill mastery in a normal school environment - for whatever reason, they just need some extra help.  So I strive to make learning not just interesting for my students, but FUN as well.  This is why I often work learning concepts into games - while drill and kill might work for getting math facts into your head forever, it's a tedious process.  I KNOW that kids need to have all the multiplication facts memorized, but I also know that they can't see the value in it yet . . . thus using games to reinforce the concepts makes it more pleasant for everyone involved.

The same thing applies to word sorts.  Oh GOODNESS, does it apply to word sorts!  Elementary teachers know that word sorts are one of the best ways to learn about and explore our language - we need to get kids thinking about the similarities and differences in words and sounds, to discover these connections for themselves . . . but it can get boring, just moving one white piece of paper around after another.  And when kids are bored?  They disconnect from the learning process.

I've been thinking for a long time how to make word sorts enjoyable - and I came up with a great solution: rather than holding a stack of words on white paper and placing them in one of two long columns, what if we had a file folder board game we were trying to fill up?  And what if the boards were a fun concept, like a garden or a pet store?  And what if the word cards had flowers or pets on them to hold the kids' interest?

The focus of this activity is still sorting the words - but there's an element of fun added. The sets I created, which are in my store at Teachers Pay Teachers, are blank and the files are editable - so teachers can use the same set for as many word sorts as they need.  Each set has 2 themes in 6 color variations each - so 12 different sorts!  Right now I have a blank garden-themed sort (with a Flower Garden and a Vegetable Garden), and a blank pet-themed sort (one is Pet Store, the other is Doggie Daycare.)

The Garden Sort also has an option with 11 vowel and vowel-team sorts already created; this product ALSO contains the entire blank Garden set.

Blank Pets Word Sort: http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Blank-Board-Games-Pets-Word-Sort-796914

Blank Garden Word Sort: http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Blank-Board-Games-Garden-Word-Sort-794103

Garden Word Sort with 11 vowel sorts:  http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Garden-Vowel-Word-Sort-File-Folder-Game-794092

The first tutoring session

Summers are a good time to work with a reading tutor, especially going into grades 2 or 3, when it becomes apparent that a student is having some trouble.  A little one-on-one attention can go a long way for a reader who is right on the cusp of "getting it."

On Thursday I started with a new student; he is a rising 3rd grader who loves sports and animals - we'll call him S.  Dark hair, grown-up teeth growing in and looking just a little too big for his mouth at the moment . . . he was quiet and apprehensive as he came in, as most new students tend to be.  I told him, as I got down on the floor, that we were just going to hang out and do some fun things today, and that I had a feeling there were lots of things he could read.  First, though, we needed to do some easy reading so he could show me what he already knows.

There's a product in my Teachers Pay Teachers store called "Reading Practice Sentences."  Quite obviously, they're designed to be assembled as File Folder Games.

I created these with various situations in mind, but one of them was evaluation.  It seems like a fun activity, since a student is asked to read fairly predictable text, one sentence at a time, and then match a picture card to the sentence he just read.  

Because their hands are involved and the focus is on picture cards, the pressure is off and I can evaluate without notice.  (I've also noticed, over the years, that struggling readers do best with one sentence at a time - isolated words are confusing because there's no context, and too much text is extremely overwhelming.)

Another benefit to these Reading Practice Sentences is that the pictures used are very common to a child's life, and invariably we will start chatting about a dog or cat, or this one time when he rode a school bus on a field trip and fell asleep on the ride home.  Kids can't learn when they're freaked out about their surroundings or the new adult in the room, so it's important to me that my students let down their guard.

After we worked through several of these sentence sets, I moved on to reading some books.  If you haven't read Mo Willems' Elephant & Piggie books with your children/students, you are MISSING OUT.  They are perfect for beginning readers.  (View Mo Willems at Amazon.)

I don't even have words for how wonderful these books are.  S. was excited when I suggested we read some of these books, as he had read "We Are in a Book!" at school - so we started with that one, and moved on through two more.  As he read, I got a sense of what his difficulties are, and helped him very subtly when he got confused or misread a word.

Anyway!  We did a few other things, but the Reading Practice Sentences and Mo Willems books are my cornerstone for any intruction to a new student!  They're my trusty stand-by's, and I wing it from there.  :D  (If you are interested in find out more, there are 3 sets of my Reading Practice Sentences, each set is $5, or you can get the bundle for $12 - find them in my Teachers Pay Teachers store.)

There is also a free sample available.