New! Supersonic Letter Song That You Need To Know!

I'm so excited to bring you a new Superhero Alphabet Activity Pack! I've teamed up with Stephen Fite of Melody House Music to create resources that go along with his songs - in this case, his Supersonic Letter Sounds song that your students will be begging you to play over and over!

The pack comes with an MP3 of the Supersonic Letter Sounds song, so you can play it  for your students at your Listening Center or on your computer. There's also a WMV file to project on your Smartboard or Promethean board!. The WMV file includes the song with easily-identifiable pictures and the corresponding letter (upper & lower case) next to it. Check out this sample:

Also included: 

 Beginning Sounds Clip Cards

My students LOVE these and they're a great SELF-CHECKING, fine motor work out! Three matching cut and paste worksheets included. 52 Cards total – 2 different pictures for each letter.

 

Alphabet Match-Up Cards 

 

26 Upper & 26 Lower Case cards combined with 26 Picture Cards. Easily differentiated, so your students match upper case to lower case or letter to beginning sound picture. As a challenge, your students can arrange them in alphabetical order!

“I have __, who has __?” Cards

 

27 cards for a whole group activity featuring letter sound and visual recognition.Easily differentiated so you can play all year - start off with letter recognition i.e. “I have C. Who has F?”  and progress to letter sounds i.e. "I have /c/. Who has /f/?"!

 Write the Room

This set includes 26 cards and 2 different recording sheets so you can differentiating according to student ability and the time you want the activity to take. If your students are starting out learning their letters or your center time is short, only place a few cards around the room. Advanced students or a longer center time? Place all 26 cards out and give students the corresponding sheet! They'll love have to find all of the cards and figure out the beginning sound!

This pack is now live on both in my TPT store and on Stephen's site, so be sure to check it out! There will be more collaborations coming in the future - Stephen Fite has some AWESOME songs that my students always love. We all know that music and learning go hand in hand, and I'm so excited to be able to create activities that go along with Stephen's songs!

 

Amazing Alphabet Progress + Giveaway!

Do you want to hear something incredible? On Friday I sent 8 of my kiddos home wearing a crown that said 'Hip, Hip Hooray! I know all of my letters and sounds!"

Two other kiddos missed it by only 3 sounds or less (they had 100% letter recognition). If these 10 students know all of this by the beginning of October, just think how far we can go by May!

When I printed out my ESGI Class Totals Report and looked at our numbers, even I was impressed! At the beginning of the year our class average for knowing all upper case & lower case names and letter sounds was only 53%. Now it is 78%!! We gained 167 letter sounds as a class, 82 lower case letters and 52 upper case letters! I had students go from 76% to 100%, but even more impressive 4% to 46%! All of my learners made gains - from my lowest kiddos to my highest, this program was effective for all! (And just in case you're wondering, I teach in a Title I school with 95% receiving free/reduced lunch. I started the year with 19 students, lost 2 and gained 1, so now I have 18. Of those 18 I have 4 ELL, 1 ADHD, 2 military children with fathers deployed, and 3 that didn't go to pre-k. I love them all, but they have the same issues that your students are probably struggling with!)

How did I do it? 26 days of intense instruction on a single letter a day with reinforcement of all letters daily! I have a Mega Alphabet Phonics Pack that we used daily. We built an anchor chart for each letter:

Each day I would challenge my students to come up with a picture I could easily draw or trace that started with our letter of the day. I can't draw at all, so they had to be super simple lol! I also didn't want to spend a ton of money on this, so when I found a few sheets of yellow and pink poster board in our work room I was so excited! We never have things like poster board, so I have no idea where they came from, but I sliced those babies in half and skipped all the way back to class! There was enough that I only ended up buying one extra yellow sheet, so the whole wall of anchor charts cost me 50 cents! And, since we're working on patterns in math, we alternated the pink and yellow. Of course that became an issue when I made the T and U both pink by mistake...those little buggers sweet angels made me redo the whole umbrella just so we didn't break the pattern!

Once I had drawn or traced the shape of the day and cut it out (while they were working on their hats), we went through our stack of beginning sound pictures and found the 4 that began with that letter and glued them on. This was great practice in discerning initial sounds, and my kiddos are such experts at it now! Once they got used to listening for the beginning sound, a lot of them made the leap to ending sounds, with a few even starting to hear medial sounds. One day one of my sweeties walked up to me and said "Hello.....oh...there's an "l" in the middle of hello! Wow!" and walked away! She never did tell me what she was coming up to me for lol!

I  laminated the pictures in advance, and used a glue stick to attach them, so I can easily take them off to reuse them next year Then each child came up and wrote the upper and lower case letter. While each child was waiting for their turn, we watched different letter videos on Youtube - Jack Hartman has a new set that is awesome, plus Sesame Street and a few other channels have great ones - but that's another post entirely!

I love our gumballs!

For some letters, I raided our craft supplies to help out - like adding streamers for the jellyfish's tentacles, yarn for the kite, and raffia twine for the balloon's string!

I also used the wall for math concepts in addition to the AB pattern - we have a rhombus kite for K, a rectangle for R and an octagon for O!

For some things it came out lucky that we landed on a particular color in the pattern - like pink pear!

Y is for Yoda...or "For Yoda, y is." 

The placement on our hallway wall was also strategic. We pass the anchor charts every time we go to recess or specials. That means 3 times a day we stop and chant our way through the alphabet. The kids stand in two rows in front of the wall and I walk along pointing at the pictures like Vanna White and we say "A is for apple, /a/ /a/ apple. B is for balloon, /b/ /b/ balloon." All the way to "Y is for Yoda, /y/ /y/ Yoda. Z is for Zebra /z/ /z/ zebra!" This takes literally less than 2 minutes, but it is such a great reinforcement! 

We also made hats each day - I made my own because what I really wanted to focus on was both initial sound and writing. A lot of the hats I've used in the past just didn't have any space for handwriting and/or the pictures they used weren't ideal (I've seen blends and digraphs used on alphabet pages before...chair does not begin with the /c/ sound...ugh! sorry pet peeve lol!) These hats give my students clear picture cues for the beginning sound and lots of practice writing the letters. This year's batch of kiddos will work pretty darn hard for a compliment, so it soon became quite competitive when it came time to color the hats. They even got into trying to match color to beginning sound (lots of yellow on the Y hats) or making a pattern when writing the upper and lower case letters!

These were two of my boys who really took their time crafting their hats!

 Each hat has 4 beginning sound pictures and then handwriting lines for students to practice writing their letters. Look how neatly this little sweetie worked!

I loved this tie-dyed hat!

This was also great daily scissor practice - one little guy needed one-on-one help daily with cutting out his hat. We went from having to do it hand over hand to him being able to cut his entire "Hip Hip Hooray!" hat by himself!!

Each day we also used the initial sound posters also included in my pack. They gave my students a great jumping off point for what the letter sounded like at the beginning of words, really cementing that sound for them. The challenge each day was to find words that started with the letter of the day that were not on our poster.

We also watch our Groovy Cat Names & Faces slideshow daily.  I took pictures of all of my students and added them to the slideshow just like in the picture below with my son Sullivan. Each day we watched the show and say "S is for Sullivan /s/ /s/ Sullivan!" and we go through everyone's name on the show. Not only did this help my students learn each other's names, thus building our classroom community, it also helped them recognize their own name in print as well as their friends! It really helps my students to add meaning to learning letters. One day when the Letter of the Day was revealed to be "L" one of my friends squealed in delight and turned to me "For Luna and Lucas!" he cried. He was just thrilled that we were going to be learning "their" letter!

Now that we've gone through the alphabet the first time, my Mega Alphabet Pack will come into play even more! I have a low group  of 3 students who need even more intense instruction. Although they showed gains during our alphabet review, they didn't make as dramatic progress as some of the others. With these students I will be working in small group, giving them hands on experiences like writing in sand, working with play dough and play foam to form letters and other experiences to really engage them in the learning process. This is the group that is going to need the most intervention and for the first little bit it will mostly be hands on with little paper/pencil.

 We'll be using our ABC Rubber Ducks from Oriental Trading for sure!

And wait until you see what we're doing with our Alphabet Plush from My Early Learning Box!

Then I have a group of 4 who are at about the halfway point. They scored between 39% - 58% on letter and sound recognition. These 4 started at 4% - 14% so they actually made the greatest gains in the class! These students need moderate intervention to help them pick up the rest of the letters and sounds. These students will be working on games during our small group time - matching upper case letters to lower case to beginning picture. Playing Roll & Cover games or clothespin clip cards, these students will soak it all up through plenty of fun activities with the chance for more pencil/paper work at the same time! All of these activities are ALSO in my Mega Alphabet Pack!

What will my high group be working on? These kiddos started out at 58% - 91% and now are at 94% - 100%. This is my largest group, and they're ready for more pencil/paper, independent work while I focus on the two lower groups. They'll mostly be working on reading cvc words and sight words, especially using activities from my Medial Sounds Pack to help them discern those tricky vowel sounds!

I am so excited by the progress that my class has made, I cannot wait for Collaboration Wednesday when we meet with admin to go over data. My principal is going to blown away! To celebrate, I decided to do a giveaway of my Mega Alphabet Pack! Enter below for your chance to win!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

10 of the Best FREE Kindergarten Language Arts Videos

Last week I posted about my favorite FREE Math Videos for kindergarten. This week, its time to look at Language Arts videos!

Again, if you don't have YouTube access at school, check out this tutorial to learn how to download the videos at home so you can transfer them to your work computers! I do this even though we have YouTube access through a filter, because you can't always count on the internet being up!

Now, I don't believe in sitting the children in front of a video and calling that learning, but I do believe that using a fun song or showing a funny clip can help engage them. Normally I try to intersperse the videos throughout the day, so that we're not sitting watching videos for more than 5 or so minutes at a time. 

Let's start with alphabet videos and work our way up:

KidsTV123 has a bunch of phonics songs (and some great math ones too!). This song focuses on the letter names, but there are several pictures for each sound. It's a great one for calming the kiddos down and getting them to focus. My kiddos now ad lib their own lyrics "A a a a a is for Alex and apple A a a a" lol! At the end of the video I pause on the scene with all of the letters on the screen, get out a pointer and have students come up to the board to point out a letter, make the sound and say a word that starts with that letter. Sometimes a kiddo will come up and say the same letter, sound and word as the person before them did - this is OKAY! That's where they are in the learning process - give them a few weeks and they'll soon be able to think of a new word for that sound or choose a different letter on their own!

This song focuses on the letter sounds and again is a nice, calming song, great for after recess! I put it on and by the end everyone is ready to focus on a story or lesson! Your kiddos need that transitional time to switch mental gears.

If you need something a bit more energetic, check out this "What Do The Letters Say?" video which is a parody of the ever popular "What Does the Fox Say?" song. We throw in some simple dance moves - crossing the mid-line with arm pumps, doing shoulder shrugs, arm circles, toe touches etc.

When you're focusing on an individual letter, there are some great choices:

Sesame Street has "podcasts" for each letter of the alphabet. These are each about 6 minutes long and contain some great old clips (I remember some from when I was little!) plus lots of new content! There is nothing like watching Cookie Monster eat the letter of the day! The use of humor makes the letters "stick" in students' heads better - we tend to remember things that evoke an emotional response!

I love the Have Fun Teaching videos because they identify each letter as either a vowel or a consonant and they include tons of letter sound repetition! 

Hooked on Phonics has some free videos on YouTube, including this rhyming one. I like this one because it focuses on the pictures without confusing the kids with the written words so that they have to concentrate on the sounds.


This video from Jack Hartmann will get your kids up and dancing while they learn their vowel sounds!  I love how the chorus has students crossing the mid-line by tapping their knees and patting their heads.

Once your kiddos are ready to read, you'll appreciate these next ones:

There are a TON of sight word videos on YouTube. Some, like the one below from Have Fun Teaching, feature just an individual sight word, while others, like this Harry Kindergarten one, cover several sight words in one song.  You can choose what works better for your class!

If you're going to focus on one word at a time, I recommend coming up with some dance moves and having your students up and moving while they watch the video. This will make it much more effective than just sitting still watching. If you're not good at dancing, think about an exercise move - toe touching, shoulder shrugging, knee tapping etc. Come up with a set of moves for 2 letter, 3 letter and 4 letter words so that you have some moves ready to go. Also, ask you students to get involved - they can come up with routines for individual words and that will help everyone in the class learn the words!

ELF Kids Videos has a ton of educational videos on YouTube. This one introduces a ton of consonant blends with great picture support and a chance for students to repeat each blend. At the end of the song I would pause on the screen with all the blends listed and have students use a pointer to select a blend, say the sound and name a word that started with it. 

This is a fun song for teaching digraphs, my kiddos always enjoyed it, although it can get stuck in your head, so beware lol!

This is a great story video for giving your students a hook to remember the sh, th, wh, and ch digraphs.

Alright, I'm cutting myself off here, that was more than 10 videos! Again, please support the people who make these videos by subscribing to their YouTube channels and checking out their websites! 
 
Did I miss any of your favorites? 
Rustle up a response below and share it please!

Letter Recognition & Fine Motor Skills!

We are back into the swing of things and I have so many ideas to share with you! One of our new activities is PlayMais. Have you heard of it?! I first saw it at the I Teach K! convention in Las Vegas and I was hooked - first it's a ton of fun and secondly when I ordered it they shipped it to my home so I didn't have to figure out how to fit it in my suitcase!

PlayMais is a German company and the pieces are completely biodegradable AND allergy safe! Even my little guy, Sullivan, who is allergic to EVERYTHING can play with it! Because, you know, at some point, someone is going to stick a piece in their mouths! They're also big on reducing packaging waste, so when my box came it contained nothing but the PlayMais pieces and the worksheet book - no bag or anything, just a box filled to the brim with little cornstarch pieces!

The pieces are about the size of a bean and made of maize, water and food coloring. They stick together and to just about anything when they're damp. The box comes with a few pieces of felt - I get it wet and wring it out and then my students dab their pieces on it to moisten them.
 
My pack came with an activity book with sheets for each letter, numbers 0-10, about 5 pages of shapes and then some mosaic pictures. I decided to laminate my pages to make sure they held up, considering moisture is involved. I just used the paper cutter to chop the pages off the binder ring and laminated each sheet.

Then I poured about 1/8 of my box into a plastic container with a lid and introduced it to my class.

They LOVED it! Seriously, every day this week this center has been FULL! At first they chose the first letter of their names, but after that they started picking letters in their friends names or random letters and it's been great for letter recognition. When the students come to the center I have them identify which letter they want to work on - then we quickly rifle through all of the pages until we find the correct letter. I emphasized that we always start our letters at the top, so it's reinforcing correct letter formation.

My students' favorite part is getting to pick up their sheet when they're done and have the pieces defy gravity and stick to it!

We even got in some math practice because they naturally started sorting the different colors and patterning with them.

This little guy's favorite color is red so you can see he picked out a lot of red pieces :)

Not only is this great for letter recognition, it's fabulous for helping to develop those fine motor skills! The kids use a pincer grip to pick up the pieces and they have to be pretty meticulous to get the pieces into the right spot without knocking the others over. Every student who has come to this center has been successful - sometimes they can only complete the uppercase letter during their time at the center, while others can complete multiple letters, but they have all thoroughly enjoyed doing what they can.

The best thing is that at the end of center time they simply knock the PlayMais pieces off the sheet and back into the container to be reused! Although some have gotten a little smooshed (who can resist pinching a few?!) our container is going to last for ages since they're reusable! Eventually I will add the number cards to the center, and the shape cards and probably by the end of the year I will encourage 3d creation with the pieces, but for now, this is a fun way for my students to work on fine motor skills and letter recognition!

If you'd like to order directly from the company, check out the Education Box here!

I'm off to work on some Penguin Emergent readers - when they're finished I'll announce it on FB and you'll be able to grab them for 50% off for the first 24 hours! Have a great night!

A Fun Activity For Learning Letters/Sounds

I have to share something super exciting for me - my class is doing amazingly awesome in learning their letters and sounds! Right before our break I did an ELQA assessment (our district adopted ELQA for our pre-k classes) on all of my kiddos. ELQA assesses upper and lower case letter recognition, rhyme recognition and production, letter sound knowledge as well as receptive and expressive vocabulary. Not only is my class on target, I have some pre-k kiddos who will make their kindergarten teachers weep tears of joy!

As I was assessing letter and sound recognition, I could tell that one activity we do is having a huge impact! Many of my students would look at a letter and shout out "B is for Braylon!" or "P is for Parker!" and were then able to make the corresponding sound. This all ties back to a power point show I made at the beginning of the year to help us learn everyone's names and to help everyone recognize at least the first letter of their name.

I took a picture of each of my kiddos in front of a black board with the alphabet card with the first letter of their name:

As an example, this is my son Tommy, so for him we would say "T is for Tommy, turtle and toothbrush /t/ /t/  T."

At the beginning of the year I only had my students' pictures in the show.  I have several kiddos whose names begin with J, K or L but we would do each of them the same way "J is for Jack, jam and jellybeans  /j/ /j/  J." followed by the same thing for Jace and Joslynn.

Once we knew all of our freinds names and were starting to pick up the 12 or so letters in the show, I started adding pictures for the other letters. I started with my sons because my students are familiar with them, then added my assistant, Ms. Davis for D. Inevitably though, I had letters that I couldn't match up with anyone.

That's when I took pictures of just the alphabet cards and then added a cartoon character to the picture on my computer. This is HoHo from the cartoon Ni Hao, Kai-Lan. I tried to use cartoon characters that my students were familiar with, which meant a bit of stalking Nickjr and PBS Kids. So we still had each of the students' slides, but now we had a slide for every letter of the alphabet!

We watch this on the Smartboard at least once a day - sometimes more often if we have a few minutes of transition time to fill. This, combined with letter activities from my Alphabet Letter Sounds Pack and my Alphabet Emergent Readers was really helping my kiddos recognize letter. But, seeing the same pictures can get boring after a while, and some of my kiddos were starting to "tune out". So I decided to throw in some random, seasonal friends to renew my students' interest:

Santa and Olaf were added, as well as Frosty, the Grinch and Rudolph!

My students LOVED these new characters, and were once again enthralled for the whole 3or so  minutes of the show.  Obviously once we come back in January,  Santa & friends will have to move on, but in their place will be Tacky the penguin! I'll be updating the show throughout the rest of the year as well - I'm thinking a groundhog, Cupid, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln for February, leprechauns and Dr. Seuss characters in March etc. 

So there we are - a fun way to expose your students to letters and sounds,  but the key is keeping it fresh throughout the year. The great thing is that it takes just a few minutes to add in another slide or delete old ones, so keeping the slide show updated is not a big chore, yet it really makes a big impact!

Alphabet Freebie!

Hey all! I finally finished my Mega Alphabet Letter Sounds Pack! Wow, I think that was my biggest pack to date! It was worth it though, because I know I'll be using it all year long!

I have some friends who have already turned 5, while some JUST turned 4 (the cutoff is 4 by September 1st and we've already had 6 birthdays - 2 that just turned 4 at the end of August and 4 that turned 5 in the first week of September!) As you can imagine, their skill levels differ wildly! My oldest kiddo knows all of her upper and lowercase letters and is just working on sounds. My youngest kiddos don't know a letter from a number and the kiddos in between are just that - some working on alphabet recognition, others have some letters/sounds already mastered. It's like teaching Pre-K AND K!

(Don't you love it when they say "Can we draw on the back?" and then you see them practicing what they've learned?!)

So when I was making my Alphabet Letter Sounds Pack I knew I needed some simple activities for reinforcing letter sounds, but I also had to think up for my high group. I also wanted a mix of no-prep sheets that I could grab and go (or leave for a sub!) and some fun center activities that we could also do in small group as necessary. Almost every activity is available in black and white too, to help cut back on that ink bill!

We tried out a few of the activities today, and will be incorporating the rest as we progress. We're on Day 23 here and after doing a lot of activities with their names, most of my kiddos are familiar with a handful of letters at this point. I'm doing a little bit of Handwriting Without Tears and introducing letters in their order, just to make it simpler for my pre-k kiddos. Can you believe I have 17/20 with perfect pencil grip?!

Anyways, if you're interested in my Alphabet Letter Sounds Pack it's on sale for 30% off through Friday night. When I wake up Saturday I'll change it back to full price :)

And...here's your freebie! My kiddos were begging me for a chance to use glue, so I made a quick sorting set for them too. We'll use the letters/numbers sheet tomorrow! If you want to grab this little pack, just click the picture!