1st Grade JOURNEYS Smart Board - Lesson 5

Hi fellow 1st Grade JOURNEYS teachers!!  Smart Board lessons for Lesson 5 (Days 1-5) are ready!! Click the picture to visit my TPT store and download.  Have a fabulous week!!         Love, Beth

Houghton Mifflin JOURNEYS Smart Board Lessons!!

   I'm finally done with my Smart Board Masterpiece (I think...)!!  I've literally been working 12 and 13 hour days on the weekends in addition to work after school getting these done (Can you tell I don't have kids?? haha), but now they are here for you all!  My school district adopted a new reading curriculum this year, Houghton Mifflin Journeys (the new 2012 Common Core Edition), and it has really been a big change for a lot of teachers, including myself.  Thankfully, though, I had taught a similar curriculum in another district (SRA Imagine It!) and had some experience using a more scripted curriculum.  However, at my old district I had made Smart Board lessons for each lesson to help me pace myself and make things more interactive for the kids, and I found myself starting Journeys this school year wishing I had the same!  So... even though it meant starting from scratch, I have started making Smart Board lessons for each Journeys lesson for 1st Grade, and it has been fabulous!  I am really keeping my kids engaged and also making sure that I am pacing the lessons well and getting everything in that I am supposed to in order to ensure my kiddos reading success.  I am SO excited about these lessons and I couldn't wait to share them with you!  I am kind of backtracking right now, because I just finished  Lesson 4 (Lucia's Neighborhood) and I am working on Lesson 5 now (Gus Takes the Train)..... so I will have to go back and do Lessons 1, 2, & 3.  But from this point forward, I will be making these each week and posting online to TPT.  So if you teach Journeys, stay tuned!!  I hope you find these as helpful as my team members and I have!  

    If you are a 1st Grade Teacher and teach JOURNEYS, please visit my TPT store.....just click on the picture.  I would love some feedback too from those of you who teach Journeys!  God Bless!
      Love, Beth

Wonderful Word Families Word Work Game

     Whew! Every year I underestimate how exhausting and stressful the first month of school is....  I think it must be like what women say they experience after they have a baby.  They're quick to do it again.... because after it was over, they forget how hard it was! Hehe. I just have to keep telling myself that in about mid-October we'll be smooth sailing... :) 
    Anyway, I have been less than blogger-ific lately just because I've been so busy.  But I'm happy to say that I am working on some resources that I think will be very helpful to lots of teachers out there (Smart Board lessons to go with every lesson of the 2012 JOURNEYS Common Core Version Reading Series for 1st Grade)... so stay tuned! 
     But what I have been working on with my kids recently is Word Families!  We've been drilling short vowels like crazy, but what some children don't put together is that if they can read one word, they can read lots of words!  That's where Word Families come in...  Teaching children to make connections between words really helps them to feel more confident as readers and writers.  So I've been working on teaching my kids how learning the ending suffixes of words (-an, -at, - in, -ug, etc...) can help them to read LOTS of different words.  If they can read and write CAT, that means they can read and write HAT, BAT, SAT, PAT, RAT, FAT, and MAT!!  You get the picture...  So I made this Word Family game to use during my Daily 5 Word Work block.  My kids have really enjoyed it, and I hope you do too!  Just click the picture to go to my Teachers Pay Teachers store. :)
   Have a blessed day blog friends! 
                     Love, Beth

Handwriting Practice - Great Resource from GROWING KINDERS!

  Hi blog world!!  I've missed you...  I seriously haven't laid eyes on my own blog in like....um....two weeks.  I just can't do it all. :)  School is off to a good start, though.  Things have been VERY busy.  And I was out of town throwing my mom a surprise 60th birthday party with family and friends, so that was a blast....but planning for that has also kept me from blogging. But anyway, enough excuses.  I have officially NOT been working on any amazingly fabulous teaching resources for all of you, but I DO have a great resource that I've been using in my classroom this week that I found on TPT from the GROWING KINDERS blog.  It has been incredible for my kids!!  Every single year I am always secretly frustrated/annoyed about how poor some of the students' handwriting is.  Many of them form their letters completely wrong (write from the bottom up, write them crooked, not on the lines, etc) and about a 1/4 of them are always flipping letters (particularly b's, d's, and p's).  My assumption was that they were getting handwriting instruction in preschool and kindergarten, but I'm not really sure if they are.  So I just decided to take matters into my own hands and make sure that I spend an entire week on explicit handwriting instruction so I can feel confident about my expectation for handwriting. If I haven't taught them the correct way to do it, I can't expect for them to do it correctly, right??  Anyway, this FREE handwriting booklet from Growing Kinders has been great!  I've done about 5-6 letters a day with the kids, and it's been a great opportunity for me to tackle individual issues/confusions that some of my kids have with letter formation and fix them fair and square!  Click on the picture to download this awesome resource!!

       God Bless!!   - Beth