First Weeks of Learning

To say this post is overdue would be an understatement. I am going to try my best to keep this sweet and to the point and also give you some freebie downloads too.  I always feel lie it takes me a solid month for the kids to start to get the swing of things and for me to gain my sanity back.  Well it's been 27 days and I think I can finally start this whole blogging thing again.  Here is a glance into some of my favorite activities the past few weeks.
We have been really working hard on sentence order and structure the first few weeks and this was pretty easy to prep and the kids worked well on this activity with their partners.  I grabbed this adorable organizer from The School Supply Addict to go along with the sentence structure sort.

CLICK THE PICTURE BELOW FOR A DOWNLOAD

I also loved introducing author's purpose last week.  This always seems to be a tricky one for the kids.  We used some of our old book order forms to sort books authors wrote for entertainment and books they wrote to inform.  This is also a great way to dip into the differences between fiction and non-fiction.  This organizer is saved on my school computer and I will get a link up this week for download. 

 I am always looking for great books to help teach grammar strategies to my littles.  I love these phonics tales series because the set comes with enough for modeling the activity and the kids can use them for independent practice.  We used these for rhyme and word family work.  The kids each got their own phonics fable book, a sentence strip, and crown.  They had to write the word ending they were hunting for on the crown and search for words that rhymed or went with that family on their strip.  When they were done hunting they made crowns.  They loved these and enjoyed being called a goofy name for the remainder of the day.

We are working hard on our small moment stories and we created this awesome anchor chart that we used as an intro into a watermelon vs a seed.  I think this really made small moments make more sense to the kids.  Plus who doesn't want to crack open a watermelon to eat while sharing stories? 

You can grab the printout for this anchor chart here. 

I plan to be back on here in a few days to share some things I have created to go along with our new Eureka math program. This has pretty much absorbed every ounce of my evenings hence why I have been dead to the blogging work the past few weeks.  If anyone else uses Eureka math and has tips on how they "fit it all in" I would love suggestions.  Have a wonderful week and happy teaching!