Daily Word Practice 5 Minute Ideas

During Guided Reading lessons, one of the big "aha" moments is when students learn to recognise smaller words or segments inside larger words. 

I decided to add this as a game activity as part of our daily morning meeting, and the result is that my students are obsessed with finding little words hiding within big words. For some reason they find this so fascinating. 

I find students waving their hands frantically to let me know that "the word AN is hiding inside the word CAN!!" This is amazing new information. We all act shocked and dismayed to discover this.

So, if you need to fill a few minutes, use your word lists to hunt for words within words. Check out all the words we found in "dragon"! 

We tally the words on the right side.

Another focus is always sight words. Do you have a Sight Word Caterpillar in your class? I'll often send my early finishers to read the words on the caterpillar (all of which we've studied for a whole week in class already). I can assign them a certain color, or they can practice with a partner. 

This week, with an extra five or ten minutes, we played "I Spy" as a whole class. 

"I spy a green word, with three letters, that rhymes with 'me'". 

Great reinforcement and easy to do with an extra few minutes to spare! 

This week we've been working on building proper sentences, and I expect students to edit their own work, and then peer edit someone else's work as well. They take this very seriously! 

Students are expected to: 

*trace and decode the words

*cut and glue in the correct order

*print the sentence neatly

*use the checklist to edit 

*draw a matching picture

*ask a partner to check it. 

Whew! Once we complete pages from this collection a few times, students can complete it independently, and I put it into my morning literacy rotations. 

{{Click HERE to see more details of this activity}}

And one more tidbit that I just have to share: after reading books with your class, use your document camera to project the pages to explore in detail together. Here we are finding and circling the "ea" sounds in words. So simple, but a quick and effective way to add phonics mini-lessons to your day!

And to help with teaching sight words in a fun way, here's a GIANT freebie! The best part? It's endless!

 

Click HERE to sign up  and get your Giant Never-Ending Game board!

Just print out the pages and attach end to end. When students reach one end they are prompted to turn around and go back, so the game only ends when you decide!

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