By the end of the school year, teachers are beyond exhausted and ready for a break. However, there are a few crucial aspects to do before summer mode officially sets in. For example, teachers love to clean out their cabinets and throw out anything they no longer need. Additionally, they love ...
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Differentiated Story Writing
When students begin story writing, they often feel confused and anxious. While they love creativity, it can be hard to develop an entire story. Therefore, they often become so stressed that they cannot focus on their writing skills. Thankfully, there are ways for students to work on story ...
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A Crafty Approach to Math
If you asked an adult a subject in school that terrified them, many would say math. Sadly, this would still be the same answer if students responded to this question. For various reasons, math scares students. However, no teacher wants their students to develop anxiety over math! They want ...
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A Hands-On Approach to Sentence Building
Learning how to write sentences can be stressful and frustrating for students. Honestly, there are so many different components to work on. For instance, students must look at correct punctuation, capitalization, and spacing between words. Likewise, they need to look at spelling and sounding ...
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Sound Wall Grapheme Song Chants
When you are teaching graphemes from the sound wall, the more interactive the better! This post is about using songs and chanting to help reinforce the relationship between graphemes and phonemes on the sound wall.
Cute Sound Wall Grapheme Letters
I use these cute grapheme ...
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Sound Wall Resources
If you would like a free sound wall starter guide sent to your inbox, click HERE.
SOUND WALL RESOURCES
Resources to help you teach with a sound wall are listed below.
Click pics and links to see more details!
READ MORE ABOUT SOUND WALLS
Setting Up A Sound ...
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Instagram Archive
Looking for a clickable link for something spotted on my Instagram account?
Click on the links and images below!
See All SOCIAL SKILLS: Click HERE
See All DIRECTED DRAWING VIDEOS: Click HERE
See All SOUND WALL: Click HERE
See All PHONICS CENTERS: Click HERE
See ...
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Sound Walls in the Classroom
When students learn to read and write, they focus on individual letters and their sounds. However, this can be overwhelming as there are 26 uppercase and lowercase letters to know. So, the Science of Reading transformed how students learn individual sounds and phonemes with sound walls. By ...
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Sound Wall: Consonants
This post answers the most common questions I have received about arranging consonants on a sound wall. I hope the answers in this quick guide are helpful to you!
Sound Wall: CONSONANTS
Question: How are consonants represented on a sound wall?
Answer: Consonants are categorized as ...
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Sound Wall: Teaching Tips
This post provides teaching tips to use with your sound wall. I hope the answers in this quick guide are helpful to you!
Teaching Tip 1: Take It Slow
Question: How should I introduce my sound wall?
Answer: Very slowly! A completed sound wall (especially with word cards) can be ...
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Sound Wall Vowel Valley
This post answers common questions about arranging vowel posters in a vowel valley on a sound wall. I hope the answers are helpful to you!
PHONEMES & GRAPHEMES
Question: How are phonemes and graphemes represented on a sound wall?
Answer: A sound wall is visual reference for ...
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Setting Up A Sound Wall
Making Sense of Vowel Valley
When I first saw a sound wall I was ...confused. After teaching reading intervention for 25 years, I didn't understand why letters were posted in a V-Shape. I also wondered why there were pictures of mouths everywhere! Fast forward to the present time... I now ...
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7 Socially Distanced Learning Activities in Primary
Here's another bunch of socially distanced learning activities that you can use in a primary classroom. You can see the first 8 ideas in this previous post! These are activities I used with my student when we went back to in-class teaching, but still had to maintain social distancing rules. ...
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8 Socially-Distanced Learning Activities
There are many fun teaching activities that we can do while still keeping students socially-distanced! With a bit of creativity there are a lot of adaptations we can make - preferably with very little preparation. I've listed eight activities below (and seven more here) that were popular in my ...
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5 Tips for Free Boom Cards
Confession time: When I first heard of Boom Cards my thought was, "I can't learn another new thing right now!" But when distance learning became a reality, I decided to give myself 20 minutes to read and learn, and then decide if it was something I wanted to try.
Guess what? TOTALLY worth ...
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Stories To Teach Social Skills
While students are in school to learn all about letters, numbers, and colors, they are actually learning all about life. So, they see why it is essential to share, wash hands, and how to react when we are upset. Additionally, they practice compromising and collaborating with many different ...
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Online Stories for Distance Learning
As more and more of our teaching involves online learning, I've realized that I have to get super organized with my online resources. This includes my huge collection of online stories! Here's how I'm keeping everything simple and organized this year:
Organizing Online Stories
Google ...
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Math Videos for Primary Classrooms
I start my math lessons with math videos almost every day.
They are a great way to warm up and start thinking about numbers. They're a great review of the concepts we're working on.
Most of all, they are so fun and interactive that my students LOVE math time!
Here are some of our ...
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Online Math Tools for Distance Learning
When teaching both online and in person, organization is a must! I found that organizing my online math tools and online stories was an important first task - it really helps having them all in one spot.
With this in mind, I'm sharing the online math tools that I have compiled so far - I ...
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Phonics Center: Six Simple Ideas
When my students enjoy a particular phonics center, I want to keep using it even when we move on to a different phonics focus! This way I know students will be happily engaged, and I won't have to spend time explaining a new activity every week. Below are some of the phonics centers I ...
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Teaching Phonics With Simple Centers
How do you manage the rest of the class while you're doing small group lessons? There are many ways to organize this situation, and I've tried them all! The most important part for my students is to make sure the centers are both engaging and easy to manage (so I don't have to stop and explain ...
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Directed Drawing Videos: Dinosaur
Have you tried directed drawing with your students? There are so many ways to use it in the classroom!
COMBINE DRAWING AND WRITING
Use your drawings as writing prompts! You can see more photos of the directed drawing activities we use in my classroom by clicking HERE.
USING ...
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Social Skills Stories
Do you use social skills stories in your classroom? One of my favorite things about teaching is sharing books and stories with my students. Even better if students can learn about important topics while they enjoy the stories and characters!
Bunny And Bear Social Skills ...
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Phonics with Centers
Every classroom has students with different needs. While some need more help, others need a challenge. So, teaching the entire class at once is often not best for students. Instead, they need lessons in small groups to ask questions and receive instruction on their level. However, this ...
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