Fun With Contractions

My class is so, so crazy about everything Pete the Cat! I have several kids who wear "Pete the Cat" shoes all the time, and on the occasional day when I wear my red Converse, WATCH OUT! Their excitement cannot be contained!

So when I was putting together some goodies for working with contractions, I decided to use graphics that hint at the Pete the Cat theme. Most people will look at the word cards I've made and think, "Hmmm... shoes."

But my class completely freaked out! "Pete the Cat words!!!"

At any rate, reading and writing contractions are one of the skills that we've always taught, and they are on the Common Core State Standards (unlike some of those skills that have mysteriously disappeared!) My students use these cards over and over for matching and sorting.And they are available on TpT. Click below!

Snowman CVC Words

January is nearly done! Unreal... time is flying.

But it's still snowman time as far as I'm concerned...

Right after Christmas, I was at Dollar Tree picking up some plastic baskets. Because really! Can you ever have enough of those?! And they had these awesome red, blue, green and yellow transparent little organizer kind of things. And I love getting organized, and I love containers. I took everything out of my desk at school, re-sorted, re-organized, re-arranged and re-joiced! So fabulous!

But while I was there, I saw the Christmas candy on clearance. They had these little snowman containers that had bubble tape in them. And since, I HATE gum of any kind, I bought them!



In my classroom, I save all the snowman activities for January, so the timing was perfect for me! I debated about whether the little red hats are too Christmas-y or not, but I decided that the kids wouldn't care, and they would fit with my January themes.

I made up some letter tiles that I printed, cut out, and sorted. Each different color spells a CVC word, and I put one color (set of three letters) in each tiny snowman. The students choose a snowman, open it up, and unscramble the letters to make a real word. Then they write the word in their word work notebooks, and add a sentence or a picture.  Probably needless to say... my little first graders love it!

If you didn't stock up on snowman gum tape, that's okay! Dollar Tree has little heart containers right now, and they would work great for this activity, too. Or they also have little miniature Tupperware-type containers. Or you could just toss all the letters in a basket, and the students could first sort by color and then unscramble. Ah, the possibilities! Must be that hopefulness of a New Year and the promise of Spring!

Or maybe I'm just too tired and should get to bed before that 5:00 am alarm goes off. Hmm...