No Worksheet Wednesday

I'm linking up again with my friend Miss Decarbo at Sugar and Spice for No Worksheet Wednesday. We are going back to the basics in our classrooms and promising to use no worksheets on Wednesdays. Every Wednesday you can link up over at The Primary Chalkboard.

Here are a few things I did today:

I work with a couple kindergarten kids who are still trying to learn the letters and sounds. I try to give them a variety of activities to help these letters stick. I have been wanting to write a blog post for a while about students who have some visual memory or visual discrimination issues that make it hard to remember those letter shapes and names. Another time...

Aaaanyhoodles, here are a few things we did to practice our letters:

This is always a big hit. I quickly type up some letters and project them. Take a piece of blank paper and have students "pick up" a certain letter. Here, they were focusing on the letters J and H (H is our "review" letter from last week and J is this week's letter). They had to pick up one of those letters, say the letter, and make the sound. At the end I pick up all the letters and the kids say the letters as I pick them up. It really seems magical to them!

We are always building letters. Usually, I use play dough, Wikki Stix, or pipe cleaners. Today, we looked around the room to use anything to make the letter H as our warm up. J was obviously a little harder;) That let to a great discussion about why H was so much easier to make. We made both letters using Wikkistix and talked about how their shapes were different (H uses only straight lines and J has a curve). It was great to get moving and building these letters. Every time they built a letter, they said the letter name and it's sound and traced it. 

With another kindergarten group, I'm working on getting those beginning sight words to stick.  They love building sentences with these sight words. I started out with just a few sight words and picture cards. Now we are able to add several more sight words to build and read sentences! After we build a sentence, we are checking to make sure it makes sense and sounds sounds right. 

We also built these words using magnets. I wanted to add context using simple sentences. I had my small group sit on their sit spots in front of the board. Together, we read the sentence. Then we decided which sight word fit.  A student would come up and build the word using magnets while the rest of the group wrote the word on their white boards. (I took the sticky note off while they built it, then put it back up to check.)

My first grade group is working on the inflectional ending, -ed. I put up this chart along with the sticky notes on the side with the two inflectional endings. We read the sentence and I called up a student to make the sentence past tense. They would then come up and add the -ed. For some of them, I asked them how I would make it "happening right now" (then they would add the -s). After we did this, we got out our white boards and practice writing these words. I would say "jumped" and we would practice writing the base word first, jump, then adding the -ed. 

We also worked on making inferences . I forgot to take a picture so this one is staged so you can get an idea of what we did. This is an inferencing activity. We read each card (there are more, but these are the first few.) After reading each card, the kids made an inference about what subject it was. Then we went back and determined which text clues helped us make our inference. 

For more inferencing activities, click here. 

Make sure you head over to Primary Chalkboard to see what other teachers did for No Worksheet Wednesday. If you don't have a blog but want to participate, comment here or on Primary Chalkboard. Tell us what you did today! :)