Words of the Week

I don't know about your schools, but ours is very large. I get quite the workout when I go and pick up my primary students. When I first started teaching I felt like I was losing a lot of time transitioning in the hall to pick up my students, so I wanted to maximize our time together. This is where my "Word of the Week" comes into play!

When I was tutoring in the America Reads program, a teacher taught me that you teach your students where to stop in the hallways. This helps with managing your class (i.e. prevents those huge gaps in line, allows you to keep an eye on all of your students, and makes them wait for you when you have to stop and briefly talk to another teacher) Therefore, I placed these "Word of the Week" posters at all of my stopping points along the way to my classroom. The reasoning is two fold. One, it allows me to manage my groups better. Two it maximizes their learning time with me because of the words I place on the posters for them to practice reading. The words I use range from simple sight words to different types of syllables.

Below is an example of my posters:



I took the template and taped it to a large piece of construction paper and then laminated it. Masking tape is all you need to hang these puppies up! I laminated the word cards for durability and put velcro on the back of them so I can easily switch them out from week to week.

Click here to download my "Word of the Week" template.

Click below to download the word cards that I use:

Preprimer Words
Primer Words
First Grade Words
Second Grade Words
Closed Syllables
Open Syllables
Vowel-Consonant-e Syllables
Vowel Team Syllable
Consonant -le Syllable
R Controlled Syllable
Mixed Syllable

Some wonderful colleagues of mine made all of the Preprimer, Primer, First and Second grade word cards. They were nice enough to share them with me and gave me permission to post them on my blog. So a special thank you goes out to Connie LaCoe and Stacey Shaffer!

So next time you are walking down the hall to take your class somewhere or pick some one up for small group instruction, ask yourself how much time did it take you and how could you better utilize that time?


Happy Reading!

No Hassle Rewards

The Title I Reading classroom is a very unique setting. Its unlike many regular education classrooms because its a small group setting where the students are only there from 30-45 minutes daily. This makes behavior management different than the average elementary classroom.

So what do you do? Well like any teacher, you create and steal ideas until you've designed what works best for you! I used the "Whole Brain Teaching" method of points. When the students do something good, they get a point. When they do something they're not supposed to do, I get a point. The object is to beat the teachers in points by the end of the week to earn their reward.

Rewards can be tricky, too. I don't always want to give the students material things, but I also don't want to take instructional time away. So I made these "No Hassle Rewards" that the students work for each week. Some of them we can do while instruction is happening. Others just take 5-10 minutes on a Friday to complete. Check out some examples below:

Click here to download my "No Hassle Rewards".

Happy Reading!