*This post contains affiliate links. Please read my full disclosure policy for more information. Here we are on Day 5 of Teaching Spelling through Word Study, a 10-day series I’m doing with iHomeschool Network. We’ve spent a lot of time on the background for word study, so if this is your first day joining me, ... Read More about Word Sorts: The Heart of Word Study
Inspire your spoken language games and movable alphabet work with these charts! These charts offer a whole new round of word study vocabulary ideally suited for memory, spelling, and dictation games. Read these charts to yourself to inspire your spoken language games. Then, use them to extend the work the children began with the Word Study Cards. When two children are working together, one child can read a word on the chart while the other child tries to spell it with the movable alphabet or chalkboard. Children then use the chart to check their own work. When one child is working alone, they cover half of the card (e.g., animal homes) and have to remember what is missing before writing it down.
Me Too, Kal-El, and I started work on compound words this week. We are really doing these presentations for our "new elementary student" this year (Me Too). I never did the word study presentations out of the albums with Kal-El because he had already picked up those concepts in the course of his reading work and spelling work when he was still in primary. However, a little review never hurt and Me Too sure appreciated the help. Me Too doesn't abstract the same things that Kal-El does (and vice-versa) and this hands-on presentation was exactly what he needed. I used the presentation from the Cultivating Dharma Language album. It was very step-by-step with beautiful pictures...no thinking required. I like to have blank, laminated label cards on hand for every part of speech so I can just fill them in for any exercise I wish rather than make special cards every time we want to use labels. I write on them with a dry erase marker. The presentation has you write some of these out right in front of the child (no prep! yea!). As always, you can click on any of my photos and they will enlarge so you can read the cards. The cards have root words on them like "butter," "fly," "basket," and "ball. I showed the boys one or two examples in which I matched objects to root words and then slid the root word cards together to create a compound word that corresponds to yet a third object. Afterward, Me Too an Kal-El took turns matching a root word from the left-hand column with a root word from the right-hand column to create a logical compound word. Without prompting, Kal-El always intentionally chose word-pairs he could see Me Too wasn't understanding. This worked out well because all the pairs were successfully matched without Me Too getting upset and feeling foolish. You always see this done with miniature objects. I was able to pull most of what I needed from our miniatures collection. Just as with the sound bins and object boxes in primary, I don't feel limited to miniatures at home. Miniature objects are compelling, but at home we don't always have every miniature we need but we have plenty of full-sized items! Wait until you see some of the close-ups! I wrote out a lot of the compound word cards while the kids looked for the object they needed, but Me Too preferred to write his own. He really can't write small enough to use a dry erase marker on such a small card correctly so I rewrote most of them before we took pictures. You'll see what I mean because I missed "eggplant" in one of the photos. I wrote cards that said "root" and "compound" and used them to label our columns. I made "lips" quickly out of playdoh while the kids ate breakfast. We only have one houseplant in the house for "plant." You can see Me Too's attempt at writing "eggplant" on that tiny little card. Most of the cards have black around the edges because I used noun cards. I ran out so some of the cards are just white. They were larger though, which Me Too really needed. I really wanted to do "cupcake" but I didn't have any cake in the house...imitation or real, large or small. We did have a Trader Joe's Apricot and Almond Tart that I pulled out of the kitchen and just told the kids "today this is cake." As you can see, this wound up being a rather large work. It doesn't have to be. A sane person might have stopped collecting objects from around the house after about a third of what I did but I was on a roll. By the way, I used a googly, wiggle eye from our craft closet for "eye" but that object and part of the "horse" got cut off when I cropped the picture to get my foot out of the photo. You win some, you lose some. I have several more great Compound Word activities planned for this week and will be sure to share. The Cultivating Dharma album has six or seven fun follow-up suggestions. I found two I liked even better so stay tuned!
Homophones can be tricky to teach and even trickier for students to grasp. Discover homophone lessons and activities students enjoy!
This game is a prelude to what will (hopefully) become some better writing on my boy's part. His stories are simple sentences with unimaginative adjectives, nouns, and verbs. I wanted to open his mind to a wider, broader vocabulary. I thought a little synonyms and antonyms game might help. I made two pages of hexagon magnets, each shape containing three words. Their antonyms and synonyms were featured on adjacent hexagons. I printed the pages on magnet paper, tediously cut them out, and then hit the library for some great books. Are you rolling your eyes? I know. I know. You're probably tired of hearing me gush all over Brian P. Cleary's books. I can't help it if they're the most fun language arts explanations I've found; my son loves them as much as I do. For this lesson, we read Stop and Go, Yes and No: What is an Antonym? and Stroll and Walk, Babble and Talk: More about Synonyms. Wildly creative illustrations, a rhythmic tempo, great explanation of the parts of speech, and examples galore! If you've never opened one of the Words are CATegorical books, run to your local library and check one out now. Prep Download our synonym/antonym hexagons free. Print on magnet paper (it costs about $6 for a 3-pack of sheets at the craft store; feed it through your printer one page at a time). Cut out. Access a 2-page PDF of synonym/antonym hexagons here. Play I put all the magnets word-side-down in a small flat tub. One was drawn and placed on our refrigerator (any large metal surface will work). Then each of us picked five hexagons as our "hand." (It doesn't matter if the opponent sees your magnets.) Then we went back and forth trying to add the magnets in our hand to the refrigerator, matching up synonyms or antonyms on the words on the shapes. It doesn't take long before a honeycomb shape emerges! If we didn't have any magnets to play, we drew a new one from the bucket. Still can't play? Then you forfeit your turn and the opponent gives it a shot. Every time you are able to add a hexagon magnet to the refrigerator, you get another turn to play any magnet from your hand (no drawing on the second - or subsequent - plays during a turn, though). Watch as you build an entire honeycomb of antonyms and synonyms! The first player to play all of the hexagons in their hand wins. Repetition to Remember Synonym vs. Antonym With each hexagon that was played, my son and I said aloud whether the words we were matching were synonyms (words with a similar meaning) or antonyms (opposites). This reinforced what we learned from reading Cleary's books!
We spend a TON of time learning sight words! I try to be very organized so that my students don't suffer my forgetfulness!!! This is the best thing I've ever done to help my students (and me)! Here's how it works: After the beginning of school rules and routines are practiced and mostly learned, I model how to get into a group or with a partner to practice. Students will get a partner close to their level and the cards they are working on and sit together in the classroom. They will take turns being the teacher and flash the words while the other says them. If there is a word that they don't know, they raise their hands and I'll help them. Later, they'll use the ask 3 before me rule. Once they master this way of practice, I'll bring out the sight board game boards, then the sight word fishing game, then the popcorn word game, etc. This has worked for several years in my K class. I've had more students than ever master more than 220 sight words each year after implementing it! I also keep a chart on the wall where each student gets to color in the list after mastery. They already love it and I've only had it up a week! Here is a closer view. It's organized in groups of ten. R1 corresponds to red list 1, R2: red list 2 and continues to Gold 22. We also have color and number words.
These cards are the a must-have for your language studies! Interested in all the word study materials? Check out our Word Study Kit for a 10% savings! This PDF file includes: 2 sets of positive, comparative, and superlative cards (7 per set), total of 44 cards 2 title card sets - one each for Positive, Comparative, & Superlative A chart containing all the rules for converting positives to comparative & superlative form Control card showing all the cards matched correctly Instructions for making & using this material This item is available for instant download. Simply click "Click here to download your order" under Order Summary in the email you receive after making your purchase to download your PDF file(s).
Try this synonyms worksheet with your third grader. This synonyms worksheet gets your child to find words with the same meanings. Download to complete online or as a printable!
Don't Be Stony Ground
This kit includes: • 120 lessons, which fit into 4 towers • a table of contents / tracking sheet • labels for drawers You will need: • Paper, color printer • Access to a laminating machine • Four, 30-drawer storage towers Directions: Print the drawer labels and tape inside each drawer. Then print, laminate and cut apart the lesson cards. Place them in the tower drawers. All cards have a code that matches the drawer it belongs in. This word study series is perfect for your classroom! • You will always have access to the files to print any pieces that may go missing. • I have put a small code on every piece of material, so you will always know which drawer a stray piece needs to go. • It is geared towards first and second grade reading levels. • Directly relates to Montessori’s word study lessons. • Perfect for independent or partner work. • The lessons correlate with Common Core Standards. I created these lessons based on my Montessori training and 20 years of teaching in a public Montessori school. There are five lessons for each skill listed, unless otherwise noted. Compound Words Suffix Prefix Antonyms Synonyms Homophones Homonyms Homographs Capital Letters x 20 Periods Abbreviations Question Marks Exclamation Marks Contractions Possessives x 10 Quotation Marks Syllables Alphabetical Order Dictionary Skills
This multiple meaning words worksheet uses context clues to help kids make sense of homonyms, or words with multiple meanings. Download to complete online or as a printable!
Phonics is a way of teaching children how to read and write. It helps them to identify the different sounds exist in each word in English Language.
Synonyms and Antonyms Anchor Chart! This blog post contains the material to create this anchor chart, plus a FREE interactive notebook entry for synonyms and antonyms!
I am crazy for Bananagrams! If you haven’t heard of them before, they are much like Scrabble tiles without the numerical value. So many teachers are using these versatile letter tiles in their classrooms as a word work tool. How exciting! Students can use them to build vocabulary words, spelling words or any word list. […]
Do you really believe that you need to watch over your mouth? Most believers don’t. You can tell that just by listening to their conversations. They profess, for example, to be trusting God concerning their health. But you’re likely to hear them say something like this: “I’m just sure I’m going to get the flu. I get it every year. I’ll be sicker than a dog too, you’ll see....” Do people like that have what they say? Oh yes! Check with them a few weeks later and they’ll be quick to tell you that they got just as sick as they said they’d be. But, odds are, if you try to tell them there’s any connection between the words they spoke and the illness they suffered, they’ll look at you as if you were out of your mind. Of course, if they’d dig in to the Word of God and find out what it has to say about the subject, they’d realize that the words they speak have a tremendous impact on their lives. They’d see that words quite literally determine their future. If you’re a born-again believer, you’ve already experienced the most powerful example of that. You believed with your heart and confessed with your mouth the Lord Jesus and you changed the eternal course of your life. You know firsthand just how powerful your words can be. Yet, even so, if you’re like me, you still find that speaking faith-filled words consistently is tough to do. I’ve been at it myself for many years now and, despite all the time I’ve spent on it and all the experiences I’ve had, it’s still something I have to watch all the time. You see, the world around you is in negative flow. Like a rushing river, it’s always pulling at you, trying to get you to flow with it. Living by faith and speaking words of faith is like trying to paddle upstream. You can do it—but it’s a great deal of work. And there’s never a time you can afford to take a vacation from it. All you have to do is relax a little bit and you’ll just start drifting right back down the river. Make the decision right now to set a watch over your lips. Determine to consistently fill your mouth with the Word of God. “Attend to my words; incline thine ear unto my sayings” (Proverbs 4:20). Let God’s Word be your watch and everything you say will take you a little farther upstream!
I saw these journals at lakeshore and fell in love with them! Due to their limited amount of sight words I decided to create my own sight w...
