1-2-3 Come Do Some ST Blend Activities With Me

The "Stuff a Stocking" packet, includes a variety of quick, easy and fun ways to help students practice words that begin and end with the ST blend.

For one activity, children color and trim a stocking, then stuff it with words that have the st blend in them, by writing the words on the front of their stocking.

The packet includes an alphabetical list of 92 common words that begin with st, as well as a list of 64 simple words that end with the st blend. 

Before sharing the lists with your students, as a whole group, have them brainstorm to see how many words they can think of. 

Write the words on the board, and have students look up any words that are new to them, jotting them down in their writing journals.  This is a great vocabulary building activity, and perfect for Daily 5 word work. 

For another whole group activity, I've included matching mini-word cards to pass out to your students, so that they can "stuff" either a  teddy bear stocking with beginning st word cards, or stuff a moose stocking, with words ending with the st blend.

To be able to "stuff" the paper stockings, laminate & trim them.  Cut a slit under the cuff portion, and attach a large Ziplock Baggie to the back.

Call out an st blend word from your list. (Before hand, highlight words that you want to review with your kiddos.)  The child holding that card shows it to the class, everyone reads the word, and then that student "stuffs" the card through the opening of the appropriate stocking.

To help build vocabulary, ask children to define the words. When you're done with the game, simply zip the Baggie and tuck in your file.

For yet another activity, students choose 3-5 cards and write sentences incorporating the word cards that they picked. To practice alphabetizing, have students write their word cards in alphabetical order.

I've included a worksheet for this, which would be a terrific Daily 5 word work activity as well. Click on the link to view/download the "Stuff it!" ST Blend Packet.

Thanks for visiting. It's time for me to get to the grocery store.  The cupboard is indeed bare, as I hate going out in the hustle bustle of December.  

The inclement weather and crowds are a bit overwhelming to me, and I'd much rather be curled up by the fire, sipping eggnog and making sketches of stuff I want to design.  Wishing you a warm and cozy kind of day.

"Christmas Time: Snowy climes and silly rhymes, a make-believe sense of time, when the old become young and the young walk the line." -Unknown

 1-2-3 Come Make A Multi-Purpose Scarecrow With Me

Since there are so many standards on our plates these days, there never seems to be enough time for everything, let alone a fun seasonal craft that we know our students would enjoy. That's why I spend so much time designing hands-on "craftivities" that revolve around all sorts of standards. 

Because it's so comprehensive, it took me several days to complete this Common Core scarecrow, and even more hours to make a sample of all 11 scarecrows, but it was time well spent, as they turned out so cute, are easy for your kiddos to make, and reinfore the following: 

Upper and lowercase letters, vowels, sc blend, beginning s sounds, matching words with pictures, numbers 0-30, odd and even, skip counting by 2s, 3s, 5s & 10s, shapes, telling time, colors, contractions, number words, color words, compound words, CVC words, and rhyming words.

Completed projects make a wonderful fall bulletin board, or look sweet hanging back-to-back from the ceiling.

To make this extra special, fold a sheet of white construction paper, have students trace their hand and then cut once, to get two hand prints for their scarecrow's "gloves".  I ran yellow construction paper through a shredder to make the "hair". 

Run off the scarecrow's body templates on a variety of colors of construction paper.  Students trim and glue together. 

For more fine motor practice, cut yellow rectangles with a paper cutter.  Have students snip the bottom portion and glue the "hay" to the back of the scarecrow's pant legs, then crumple.

I purposely made these patterns super simple to cut out, but if you think this is too much for PK kiddos, have a room helper trace once and then cut 3-6 shirts and pants out at a time,  leaving just the head for preschoolers to cut out.  

There's a blank head so children can draw their own scarecrow face, as well as a completed template for little ones to color.

 Students make their scarecrow and then trim and glue on the appropriate patches.  The vowel scarecrow is especially versatile, as it not only covers vowels, but shapes and colors too.

For extra practice, when everyone is done, play an "I Spy" game and give students a piece of candy corn to use as a manipulative.  Choose a student to call out a "patch". 

Children locate that letter, number, shape or whatever, cover it with the candy corn, and then raise their hand. 

This is a fun way to practice and review standards, as well as a quick and easy way to whole group assess, as you can see at a glance who is having difficulty. 

I've also included blank patches for you to fill in with whatever, plus ideas and templates to use the number, letter and shape scarecrows for matching games.

i.e. match the lowercase patches to the uppercase letters; match the number word patches to the numbers; and/or match the shapes to the shape words.

For more scarecrow-themed letter fun, click on the link for a set of scarecrow alphabet cards.

The following scarecrows are wonderful for vocabulary building and Daily 5 word work: Carl is the Compound words scarecrow; (Click on the link for an alphabetical list of over 3,000 compound words.)

Connie, is a contraction action scarecrow; (With an alphabetical list of 72 contractions)

Sam, is a scarecrow that loves 37, 3-letter words that begin with S; (CVC practice!)

Scott, is the SC blend scarecrow, with a list of 50 words. The packet also includes an entire SC blend section, with lots more activities.

Sophie, is a scarecrow with 47-picture patches, for simple words starting with the letter S. 

For a quick review, I've also included 4, Ss word, picture posters.

Rodney, is the Rhyme Time scarecrow, with 56 words that rhyme with scare and a list of 274 words that rhyme with crow.

Write the words that rhyme with scare on the front of Rodney, and have children choose some words that rhyme with crow and write them on the back.

In the sample, I chose 24-scare rhyming words and wrote them on the shirt, and then wrote an equal amount of words that rhyme with crow, on the pants.  The alphabetical lists include rhyming words that start with every letter except U & X.  I chose one of each.

Finally, the number scarecrow, has several options and serves double duty.  There are number patches from 0-30, which  I traced in a variety of colors. 

You can make Odd Todd and Even Steven scarecrows (front and back) or put the odd numbers on the top and the even numbers on the bottom.  (See photo.)

For more math number practice, I've also included skip counting patches.  Children can skip count by 2's, 3's, 5's and 10's.  There are matching worksheets in the packet as well, along with number cards, plus number puzzles in color & black and white.  

For more odd and even scarecrow number fun, click on the link to practice numbers from 1-120, in the Scarecrow's Pumpkin Patch packet.

If your kiddos are familiar with that concept, but need to work on matching numbers to their number words, use the Norman & Nancy number scarecrow patterns, with numbers 0-10, along with their matching number word patches.

Glue the numbers on the shirt and the number words on the pants.  For more practice, have students write the words above their matching number patch.

Click on the link to view/download the "craftivity" portion of the Common Core Scarecrow Packet.

This section will be FREE for an entire year!  After that, you can pick up the whopping 184-page jumbo packet in my TpT shop for just $5.95.  Click on the link for Patches, The Standard Scarecrow Craftivities packet to pop on over.

Thanks for visiting today.  I need to unclutter my brain, so we're off to a nearby fall festival.  It's a beautiful autumn-weather day, if the rain just holds out for awhile. 

 "If stars can shine with darkness, so can you." -Unknown

Getting To The Core With A Box

If someone asked me what was the most Googled Word or phrase that was "hit" for my site,  I would easily answer Elkonin Boxes.

If you are not familiar with them, they are a huge help in teaching the Common Core State Standard: RF.K2b as they are simply "boxes" that are a visual representation that helps students count, pronounce, blend and segment syllables in spoken words.

The 20-page packet includes 50 word templates + 3, 4, and 5 letter box blank templates, for teachers/parents to use in a variety of ways.

• Elkonin boxes can be used to teach phonemic awareness by having students listen for individual sounds and marking where they hear them in the boxes.
• Each Elkonin box in an Elkonin box card represents one phoneme, or sound.
• Elkonin boxes are a physical segmentation of words into phonemes.

• I make my boxes a bit longer when a digraph or blend is involved because it fixes the spelling in a child’s mind. (I think this helps them with decoding and spelling, as phonemes count as one sound not one letter.)
• There are many activities that teachers can do with Elkonin boxes, but the main activity teachers usually use them for is to 'stretch' out words, identify similar or different sounds and then guess at spelling.
• I’ve made an alphabetical list of some of the more popular words for kindergarten and first grade.

• You can use them as skill sheets or run them off and laminate them and use them as a center activity, or flashcards.
• Students can use counters, chips, or unifix cubes to mark the boxes or run the masters off on copy paper and have students use a bingo dot marker or write in the letters.
• There's also a writing master, where students are given a word to break down and then they use that word in a sentence. 

Here you can remind students to separate their words, capitalize the beginning word and use end punctuation, which are  Common Core State Standards: RF.1c, L.K2a, and L.K2b.

Any of these Elkonin Box worksheets make great "Word Work" for Daily 5 activities too.

Click on the link to view/download Elkonin Boxes

Do you have an activity that you use Elkonin boxes for, that you could share with us? I'd enjoy hearing from you. diane@teachwithme.com or leave a comment here.

Thanks for visiting today. Feel free to PIN anything you think others will find helpful.

"What comes from the heart, goes to the heart."-Samuel Taylor Cooleridge